What will Bitcoin be like in 20 years?

Predictions are a delicate matter.It is very easy to make a mistake, but very difficult to guess.But that's exactly what we dolet’s do it. In connection with the approaching tenth anniversary of the publication of bitcoin whitepaper, I will try to predict what will be bitcoin, blockchain, alternative cryptocurrencies and decentralization in 20 years.

This is one of those articles that will seem incredibly stupid or breathtakingly brilliant when I become old and gray. But I do not care. I am ready for this.

I’ll go much further than “Bitcoin will drop to zero” or “Bitcoin will become a reserve currency and will cost $ 1 million.” Such predictions do not make sense, and anyone can make them.

Instead, we reflect on how technology and society will evolve with it.

I have compiled successful predictions of the future andtechnologies, but nobody in them was 100% right. Arthur C. Clark, one of the greatest science fiction writers of our time, predicted the advent of satellites and GPS, cloud storage, the Internet and telecommunications, but, by his own admission, he overestimated the importance of rockets and underestimated the importance of the prototype laptop that the company gave him to write the next a novel.

Chaos theory argues that the future cannot be predicted. But this is not entirely true.

We cannot foresee the emergence of “black swans”or a completely unexpected technology (try explaining what a computer or the Internet is to an 18th century farmer), but we can do a Monte Carlo analysis of the future and see the main ways the future will develop. Only a few people can do it right.

Most people see the future ridiculously wrong, so before we start predicting, we need to understand why this is so in order to avoid the same mistakes.

The internet will never become popular

The first reason people are mistaken about the future is that before they form an opinion about something, people spend only about five minutes on this subject.

This is not a reflection.

It is the ancient "lizard brain" engagedmental heuristics, which are absolutely unable to understand anything new and previously unknown. It is good for attack, defense, finding food and shelter, and also relieves boredom. Such a machine for survival.

Unfortunately, many people have been living at this level for most of their lives, and their judgments are worthless when it comes to predicting new trends and developments.

The second main reason people are somisunderstand the future, lies in the fact that the future does not correspond to everything that they understand about this world. Take, for example, Kodak, which simply refused to understand the power of digital photography because it has been building a chemical film business for more than a hundred years. Kodak had all the cards on hand, but they did not use them. They took the past for the future and paid a very high price for it, went bankrupt as soon as the market advanced. In order to see the future, one must overcome oneself, forget past achievements and think beyond the limits of existing concepts.

The third main reason why people are wrongsee the future, is that it can undermine their existing position in power. That is why oligarch banker Jamie Dimon and the prince of a country in which women were allowed to drive a car only last month, believe that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are “fraud” or “scam”.

When someone tells you #bitcoin is a scam pic.twitter.com/0JDHIO6RSV

— Crypto ฿oss (@LegendOfCrypto) October 29, 2017

When you are told that bitcoin is scam

They literally cannot see the truth becauseare the main beneficiaries of the existing system. They do not want to see. Therefore, they get involved in the information war, without even realizing it. It is just a mental defense mechanism. The discovery of new ways of life will endanger their position, and this will terrify them.

To ask such people about Bitcoin is the same.just ask a taxi driver what he thinks about Uber or a horse, or ask a buggy driver what he thinks about cars. Their opinion is absolutely worthless.

The fourth main reason that people do notcan predict the future lies in the fact that they mistakenly take their opinion for reality. You have your own view of the world, but there is a reality, and often this is not the same thing. The first is the map, and the second is the territory. Do not confuse the map with the territory.

Take the infamous 1995 article by Clifford Stoll of Newsweek, in which he said that the Internet was going to crash. Stoll writes:

Dreamers see remote workers in the futureinteractive libraries and multimedia classes. They talk about electronic meetings of city residents, about virtual communities. Commerce and business will migrate from offices and shopping centers to networks and modems. And freedom of digital networks will make the state more democratic.Complete nonsense. "[Author's emphasis.]

While reading this quote, it is impossible to hold back a broad smile that appears from the realization of one's colossal superiority. What an idiot! Who could not have foreseen the future of the Internet?

Answer: almost no one.

After the fight, they don’t wave their fists.

I'm willing to bet that almost everyone who laughs atthis poor guy, also didn’t see such a future, and maybe didn’t even know what the Internet was. Even if they understood this, they certainly could not have predicted the advent of Wikipedia, the development of telecommunications, or the ability to buy everything from books to groceries on Amazon.

The most surprising thing in this quote is not its inaccuracy, but how accurately she described the future in its various fields.

And so it is.

Read the article and you will see tons of predictions that have come true!

If you search for all of Stoll’s statements, you’ll have a very clear picture of the next two decades of the network. Take, for example, this quote:

“The director of MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, believes that soon we will buy books and newspapers directly over the Internet.”

I nodded only: "Yes, of course." He thinks so.

Stoll saw the future, but he didn't want itsee. If he could get out of his delusionsand just to observe, and not interpret and filter what he sees, the article would go down in history as one of the most far-sighted and accurate of all the articles ever written. This brings us to the following reason.

The fifth reason why people do not perceive the future correctly is an absolute lack of patience.

Take the first line from Stoll’s article:

"After two decades of online, I am confused."

Stoll had already lived twenty years during the existence of the Internet, but he still did not understand anything. It is very easy to decide that nothing will happen, since so much time has passed without any changes.

Waiting is the hardest. The natural development of things takes time.

Patience. Patience. And only patience.

Creativity implies problems, failures andirresistible resistance. As soon as you put an idea into reality, where rust, gravity and friction reign, everything begins to fall apart. No plan will survive contact with such an enemy. Reality is a whetstone that completely completes your ideas or sharpens them.

Everything takes time.

A classic example of a true creative process, showing how long you can wait, is the inventor of the Velcro fastener Georges de Mestral.

The idea was born in 1941, when after a walkwith a dog in the forest, he found thorns on her hair. This concept languished in his head for the next seven years. In 1948, he began work on creating small hooks, and only ten years later, he finally succeeded, and he launched mass production.

After the opening of the company in 1950. he expected unprecedented demand.

But that did not happen.

He waited another five years before the organization of the spaceprograms in the 1960s when the Velcro helped astronauts with bulky and bulky spacesuits that were difficult to take off and put on. The rest of the world thinks only about its problems that need to be solved, and not about what kind of idea or ideology will be behind it. Soon after, the ski industry used this idea in shoe design.

How much time has passed from the moment the idea was born until its application to the creation of a successful business?

About twenty-five years.

And finally, we can learn something else from Stoll before I present my predictions about cryptocurrencies.

His biggest mistake was the sixth andThe final reason people are not able to see the future. He took existing inventions, projected them into the future and created solutions for future problems with their help. It’s fundamentally wrong!

Existing inventions can solve only existing problems. For future challenges, completely new solutions are needed.

In the article, Stoll argues that the books areCDs will never replace real books. He was right - reading books on CD from a terrible CRT monitor that ruins the retina was very inconvenient. But having understood this, we can understand what characteristics the future invention should have.

It is almost impossible to find out how it will look, but we can determine its characteristics in order to understand what the invention should be.

Let's see how it works:

CDs are uncomfortable. The blurry text on the monitors of that time was hard to read. This hurt my eyes. Computers were huge and not very mobile. Even laptops were then bricks that worked against your legs. No one wanted to read anything on them.

But Stoll also did not take into account the flaws of the books.

Books are heavy too. They are made of trees! They can be easily lost or ruined due to weather conditions. You can only carry a small number of books with you.

Based on this, we understand what the solution should be:

Supermobile and light;
Have a very clear display;
Hide data storage from the user;
Be comfortable reading books. Just opened and read;
Protect information from loss and distortion, be able to recover information without having to buy it again;
The ability to carry many books at once.

Of course, we already know the answer: Kindle and iPad.

Both devices are incredibly convenient, completely hide the storage from users, protect information through backup and do not harm the eyes.

Solutions begin with understanding the problems, with the right questions about how to solve them, and also with a clear definition of what features a better product should have.

From the foregoing, we single out three principles that will help us predict the future:

Patience.
Observation, not interpretation.
No need to take existing inventions and try to solve the problems of the future with their help.

Great, now let's look into the crystal ball and find out the fate of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

I hope we have better luck than Stoll and this article doesn't become the basis for an article on Boing Boing that makes me look like an idiot.

The success of bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and decentralization

We will start with a few simple predictions, and then move on to more complex and distant, as well as conflicting predictions.

I attached a confidence meter to each item, which shows how confident I am in the scenario presented.

1. The bubble will burst

People who understand and do not understand cryptocurrency consider it a bubble that will burst, and prices will fall sharply.

They are right. So what?

This is not the end of the story. This is just the beginning.

Today we are in amazing euphoria. So great is the potential. We literally already feel a decentralized future. It's around the corner! It will come at any time.

Of course, most likely everything will go wrong. The bubble will burst. Vitalik is right. 90% of tokens will fail.

But after this explosion, real work ideas will appear.

During an eight year experiment withwe work with cryptocurrencies with the hope for the future, but all we have is speculation and smart contracts. Creepy and practically unusable applications are created. When you click Submit and send $ 5,000 online, your nerves are on edge. You hope that you copied and pasted the address correctly and your money will not evaporate!

When the Internet bubble burst, the stocks of many companies that became successful today fell 85%. And yet they survived, and a bright future awaited them. Amazon and Google dominate.

The same thing will happen with cryptocurrency.

10% of projects that survive the bloody slaughter will turn into Amazon, Google and Facebook of the future. The same will likely happen to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, not to mention future governments, digital direct democracies or delegative democracies.

Innovation is hard work. You are literally trying to create something that does not exist!

You do not have leadership, there are no workpieces, there are no business models that can be taken as a basis. Nothing. You are on your own! There is only you and your imagination. 90% of all people and companies will fail!

But it is not important.

Cryptocurrencies, blockchain, a triple accounting system - these are perhaps the most important inventions of the last 500 years, so they just will not go into darkness.

The next step is a bubble explosion. After three years of full development and leap.

2. State cryptocurrencies are waiting for rapid development

This is obvious, although the community will not like it.

Many governments will not just sit andlook, they will not give up control over the money supply without a fierce battle. Everyone who is currently working on the project should anticipate attacks at the protocol level on decentralized cryptocurrencies and should create protection against them.

Distributed decentralized safety netfrom DDoS attacks, for example, from Gladius - this is a good first step, but much remains to be improved. We will talk about some additional defense mechanisms that cryptocurrencies need to survive when it comes to the evolution of protocols.

Governments will eventually lose thisa battle, perhaps thirty to one hundred years later (maybe earlier, depending on how many wars and financial crises there will be). This will happen if we survive as a race, do not kill ourselves and go into space. But in ten or twenty years, state cryptocurrencies will be very strong, they will control the cash flows of many, if not most, people in the world.

“But no one will accept them!” Cryptocurrency protector will shout!

Of course they will.

The average person is absolutely notunderstands what is really important, he absolutely does not see the need for confidentiality and security until such extreme conditions as war break him out of it. When soldiers break into the house and take away everything that belongs to the owners, people suddenly realize that they need security.

Remember this interview with Snowden on the John Oliver show on government surveillance?

Look at the expression on Snowden's face when heunderstands that the average person from the street does not know a damn thing about privacy and absolutely does not value it! Such people are worried about this only if the government suddenly has a photograph of their causal place. Seriously.

People will accept state currencies as obedientlittle sheep without even thinking. In addition, they will be sure that this is absolutely correct, they will be ready to go for the kill if someone suddenly says that this is not so. I bet!

32/ It's nonsensical to have a blockchain controlled by a sovereign, a corporation, an elite, or a mob.

— Naval (@naval) June 21, 2017

Blockchain without a coin, like a market without money, is nonsense.

Blockchain controlled by a sovereign, corporation, elite or crowd is nonsense.

This is nonsense, because the main goal of the blockchain isdistribute power throughout the system. By not allowing one group to arbitrarily control or change the rules of the system, decentralized cryptocurrencies and applications provide a powerful system of checks and balances from destructive actions directed against it.

If the blockchain belongs to five different banks, thenit is no longer a blockchain, but a database. The real blockchain is when banks, regulators, shareholders and bank customers all have access to the blockchain and can interfere with each other's actions. The system of checks and balances that protects power is the essence of this!

State cryptocurrency will become an absolute and perfect perversion of this idea. But it will not matter. They will do it anyway.

Instead of distributing power, they will acquire moremore influence, gaining the ability to track with impunity every citizen’s expenses and automatically collect taxes from salaries and sales of goods and services. Therefore, authoritarian governments are so eager to create official state cryptocurrencies. They are looking forward to when in your pockets this panopticon money will be.

They will outlaw cash using one of the following three pretexts:

Stop money laundering;
To fight terrorism;
To fight crime;

Of course, when half of your funds are goneon Amazon, food and rent, you don't care about these points, but if you loudly declare the fight against these three points, then you can easily get half the population to do what you want, and besides, they will do it according to of your own free will.

Remember the conversation of the American psychologist GustavGilbert with Nazi Hermann Goering during the Nuremberg Trials? Goering said that most people will follow their leaders no matter what they tell them, whether it be democracy or fascist dictatorship.

Gilber naively answered: “There is one difference. In democracy, people have the right to vote during the election of representatives, and in the US only Congress can declare war.

But Goering laughed and said: "Yes, it's very well. But with or without a voice, people can always be made to obey leaders. It's simple. You just need to tell them that they are being attacked and to discredit the pacifists for the lack of patriotism and for putting the country in danger. It works the same in any country. ”

State cryptocurrencies will be a very bitter pill for those who today truly believe in cryptocurrencies, but they will have to swallow it.

It can also be assumed that hybridsystems with a decentralized and centralized cryptocurrency, and they can begin to be developed right now to avoid the impending tsunami. It’s better to complement the existing system with a blockchain to fix it from the inside, than just ignore it and wait for it to become hostile.

3. Decentralized cryptocurrencies will become a parallel economic operating system of the planet

Decentralized cryptocurrencies will not disappearjust because centralized cryptocurrencies will have more power. Many governments will try to exterminate them, but in the end they will fail. The reasons are simple.

Governments cannot come to a consensusfor the same reason that it is difficult to come to a consensus on the blockchain. They cannot do this. Some governments will like decentralization, and some will hate it.

While some countries are openThey are opposed, many others, especially those who have suffered most from the influence of Europe and the US dollar over the past century, will openly support decentralized cryptocurrencies.

Latin American countries such nothinglimited and uncompromising globalists like Singapore, as well as the historical world banker Switzerland and many other countries in Asia and Africa, will accept a decentralized cryptocurrency with open arms, even if you have to adhere to the course of existing powers.

If all countries do not come to a consensus, then decentralized currencies will not go anywhere, even if centralized cryptocurrencies gain power.

But in order to stay afloat,decentralized cryptocurrencies are set to evolve quickly. They need a killer app that will take them all over the world. It must be something so important that people cannot imagine their lives without it. This will draw existing power players into the system and they will begin to use their power to protect the application from outside attacks.

One of the ways I outlined in my article aboutgame method of distributing money. But this is only one way. There are many others. If you are currently working on a platform, then remember that this is a race against time, until centralized cryptocurrencies take everything into their own hands.

4. The killer app for cryptocurrencies is NOT a browser

This is a classic example of introducing oldinventions in a new system. The Brave browser is great, and I really will love it if it is combined with the BAT and / or universal payment system, which will automatically convert cryptocurrencies without the need for exchange. But I do not think that this will be the final blockchain interface. I think this is just a potential interim step.

What should the killer app look like? I dont know. But here is what I know:

Universal;
Easy to use;
It works as a platform for everything from exchanging money for purchasing tickets to protecting privacy and information;
Open source.

It should also be something completely new and original, which emphasizes and develops the best characteristics of the blockchain, while minimizing its weakest points.

Maybe a decentralized assistant with artificial intelligence or a filter of attention? The possibilities are endless! Forward!

5. Blockchain is just the beginning of a decentralized consensus.

Blockchain systems are just the first successful use of decentralized consensus mechanisms.

People are already coming up with new things like Tangle and HashGraph.

It doesn’t really matter if both of these projects fail in the long run, because other projects with a different basis will appear. This is a guaranteed truth.

I believe that in the next twenty years will appeardozens, if not hundreds, of experimental distributed consensus protocols that will surpass Visa in transaction capabilities and will be complemented by systems with artificial intelligence.

Also, it is likely that none of these systems will be invented by people.

Artificial Intelligence will very quickly considerall ideas and come up with a system that could not come up with humanity even in a hundred years. He will draw inspiration from nature, insect life, roots and other biological systems, such as proteins.

One or two of these systems will turn intometasystems will manage all the coins, combining them, as well as the entire system as a huge fractal, which has an infinite number of subsidiary networks.

6. Using cryptocurrencies will be much easier.

Today, using cryptocurrencies is very inconvenient.

If I make a typo or copy it incorrectly andput it in, then my money will disappear forever. If any terrible program crashes, then I will lose my money forever. If someone breaks into my computer or phone, the money will never come back to me ever.

See the trend? Any mistake and you are in trouble. It's like riding a motorcycle along the edge of a two-centimeter mountain road without fences.

Major wallets are slow, difficult to useuse and are simply terrible. The last time I upgraded Ethereum, I forgot to save the private keys, so I had to restore them. This year my old Bitcoin was stuck in the old version of Multibit from 2013. It took me a week to get it out of there. The software mistakenly thought I had made a transaction that never happened.

Imagine these wallets will bebe used for long-term storage, and you decide to use them after five years. Can you use them? What happens when quantum computers appear, and we have to completely update the basic protocols that are the foundation of the system?

The average person can neverto do it. No chance. Two decades in the IT field have taught me that people can ruin and, of course, ruin their computers in ways that do not even occur to experts in this field. Murphy's Law in action.

But the situation is even worse, because we can’t canceltransaction or protect it from errors. I believe that transactions will be frozen, rolled back and protected by a variety of algorithmic methods, as well as ways to deposit money from yourself and return stolen funds. It’s like an automated call to the bank after you have stolen a credit card.

Only systems that offer all the features of the old system, as well as completely new features, can be massively implemented.

Let's get back to CD books from the 1980s. They had new characteristics, tables and color, you could save them.

But that was not enough, becauseCDs had fatal flaws. In his book, The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil calls this a phase of evolutionary development called the “false pretender.” The new technology has some advantages, but it has too many disadvantages that prevent it from becoming popular and replacing the old technology.

Only with the advent of the Kindle and iPad are electronicReaders began to combine the properties of reading regular books, including mobility and ease of use for the eyes, with new properties, including the ability to carry a thousand books with them at the same time. A dead tree can't compete with that. Such an invention can really become successful.

Cryptocurrencies should follow the same path - from total failure to transferring unprecedented new power to people and companies that will ensure world domination.

I also believe that many systems will be createdbecause of the desire of people to transfer digital money to their children. To do this, we will need special banks created by groups of people, or algorithmic banks and bulletproof wallets with multi-signatures, decentralized cloud storage or a service with vouchers that will become the final judges.

It will not be enough just to split the keys andPass them on to your trusted friends and loved ones. It just seems like a good idea at first. Friends cease to be friends, people get divorced and die, or worse. We need something better, something completely automated.

Think about how difficult it will be to pass bitcoins to your loved ones today. What if you die tomorrow or get hit on the head and forget your password?

Even if you have everything ready for this, your plan is not very good.

You'd have to make a will, copyyour private keys and wallet in a safe place, give the password to the real estate lawyer and hope that he doesn't steal your money and also that your USB flash drive or Trezor/Nano don't break. You could also create a multisig wallet with friends and family and hope that no one pushes another version into Github with a backdoor or bug that ruins everything. All these methods do not inspire confidence. This is simply unacceptable.

By the way, if you want to open a cryptocurrency business that will benefit the whole world in the future, then I propose to solve the inheritance problem. You will be gladly paid back for it.

I foresee smart contracts withfunction drag & drop and AI-generated wills with self-escrow. In fact, the blockchain itself will become a bank and customer service department, perhaps using biometric identifiers and third parties with proof of ownership, or decentralized artificial intelligence that can verify your loved ones, as well as trigger the necessary transactions after your death. Automated password and key regeneration will be a STOP command.

No matter how it looks, wesimilar algorithmic control systems will be needed to give money to the right people and to prevent them from falling into the hands of robbers. We also need a system of protection against accidents, death and loss of mind.

7. Coin protocols abstract from the coins themselves

Today, all existing coins are inextricably linked to their protocols.

I believe that the protocols will be abstracted in order to exchange, send and receive, as well as protect and store coins.

This will be a consequence of the evolution of today's servers, which will turn from metal boxes into virtual containers, and then off-server data processing will be carried out.

Firstly, most coins are impossibleto scale. Blockchain, the Holy Grail of any cryptosystem and the subject of so many disputes and disagreements cannot even come close to the level of Visa transactions. Bitcoin can carry out a maximum of 7 transactions per second.

Some people go even further and consider this a positive quality of the coin, because it motivates people to save and store, rather than send coins. This is just absurd.

It should be possible to send coins as fast, far and often as we want.

I must admit that the limit of 1 MB is"Crutch". Bitcoin initially had no limits. Then, overnight, Satoshi introduced a restriction in the main code, without even mentioning it and without explaining anything. Most likely, it was an awkward attempt to prevent DDoS attacks.

We can come up with a better defense. Are you in favor of 1 MB? What about 2 MB in SegWit2X? Or are you in favor of an 8MB block of Bitcoin Cash? Wrong. All these decisions are wrong and absurd.

According to the Lightning Network guys, if seven billion people made just two transactions per day, the situation would look like this:

Blocks of 24 GB;
3.5 TB / day;
1.27 PB per year.

In order to come up with a real solutionproblems, we need to think differently, and not come up with all kinds of nonsense. In order for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to survive, they must change. In the future, it will be easy to introduce new protection, new cryptographic algorithms when quantum computers appear, higher speeds and innovations.

We cannot rely solely on Satoshi’s successes and suppose that he thought everything through.

This is not true.

Honestly, who cares what Satoshi thinks? He quit the project. If he really wanted to lead him, he would appear as Linus on Linux. But he did not. He left the project, and we ourselves have to deal with it.

Therefore, let's do it because the existing system will not stand or become a slave to expensive processors, as is happening now.

One way is to abstract all protocols and run the equivalent of old coins in virtual machines or in containers. Thus, the rules themselves will separate from the coins.

This is just one way. For a real breakthrough, the blockchain needs real innovation.

We need to think quickly, otherwise while we argue, we need a block of 1 MB or 2 MB in size, crypto ruble and crypto yuan will appear.

This is also necessary because in the future weit will be necessary to defend itself against attacks by hostile system participants and APT (advanced persistent threat). Think of the Great Chinese firewall, which attacks or blocks transactions, confusing packets and headers, and the “man in the middle” in it is a state representative. The right first step was the NEM architecture, as it includes firewall-like host protection.

But we need to go further to stop even more cunning and destructive attacks, and the decision cannot wait four years or imply a hard fork.

The best solution is likely to be externalblockchains that protect the rules that will be downloaded to all nodes of the network and will record intrusions, act as firewalls and monitor protocols, have a self-developing set of rules and an anti-intelligence system of countermeasures.

Remember the ICE Neuromancer?

8. The world will be dominated by four metamonets, as well as 50-100 hundreds of smaller coins, an infinite number of virtual variants of these coins, as well as state coins

Right now we are creating coins for everything. Have you created an identification platform like Civic? Create a coin. Created a decentralized DNS? Create a coin and ICO!

The stupidest blockchain app? You, my friend, need a coin!

In fact, a coin is not needed.

Coins will be divided into different categories. Now I can only imagine four types of necessary coins that the blockchain blockchain (or technology after the blockchain) will exchange according to needs:

Coin deflation;
Coin inflation;
Action token;
Token rewards.

Deflation coins are for accumulation and investment. Over time, they will increase in price and make a profit. Everyone needs such investments, for this, first of all, Bitcoin appeared.

The inflation coin is today's dollar.No one is going to spend Bitcoin to buy a flat screen TV only to realize they spent $175,000 on it a few years later when the price of Bitcoin skyrockets. We need stable coins that can be spent. This will be the classic “storage medium” that Paul Krugman always talks about. Such a coin will be needed to buy and sell everyday goods.

Action Token is for freeOnline activities, such as voting or sending a text message. This is not a nanotransaction. A password change should not cost two pennies. As the EOS guys say: “If you need to spend three cents to load a page on Amazon, no one will load this page.”

Reward tokens are intended for interactions in the system. This is digital karma that motivates good behavior and punishes bad behavior.

You can literally build a universal system with these four coins. Any other coin will be only an additional component of these coins with other metadata.

9. We will understand that our knowledge of the economy is insignificant

Are you a Keynesian or an adherent of the Austrian free market?

Who cares?

All our economic theories are based onstudies of a limited amount of information in the analogue era of ink and wood pulp. All existing economic theories will turn out to be as advanced as cave paintings, when new economic systems appear over the years.

These are the new coins: the war of microeconomic systems. This is Darwin's economy.

Some basic laws of the housekeeper are true, butmany of them just fall off on the road. This will happen because the dominant systems on the blockchain will have economic data in real time and on a global scale, and not just a few guesses written in pencil on paper, as it was a hundred years ago.

If artificial intelligence will collectreal-time statistics around the world, we can see how steel prices are adjusted in one country, while in this regard, construction prices in another country soar. We can track global production with incredible accuracy, and much of what we learn will surprise us very much.

10. DAO will become one of the 500 richest companies

Probably the richest DAO (decentralizedautonomous organization (decentralized autonomous organization) will be the DAO that will offer an open version of Visa. Most likely, it will take its share of transactions and the largest miners, as well as finance the future development and management of the network.

Such an organization will not store all the money,it will act as a liaison that will transfer money to other companies and the DAO using smart contracts, as well as to the state, local governments and other non-governmental organizations that benefit the network.

For this, the DAO needs to evolve. Today we present the DAO as a smart contract. And this is not at all what is needed.

DAO will require artificial intelligenceto manage and limit rules. The organization will also need to automatically generate template management models. Governance in a DAO is everything. There are still no good enough scalable models for running large corporations, such as an open meritocratic workspace. The first DAOs failed because they faced the Brave New World problem.

Everyone presents himself as a boss, and no one wants to take out the trash. It is very difficult to order paper clips when every employee in the DAO is king.

For effective work, the team mustdistribute roles and stars among themselves. People should also understand their role and accept it, even if it changes after a person gains merit and experience in the system.

It is very difficult to organize management incorporate environment. How to fire a person for not fulfilling duties in the DAO? How do you make sure that the guy in charge of ICO security is sufficiently qualified and was chosen not only because everyone liked him? You cannot lose $ 45 million in bitcoins just because Bob was chosen for his story about Burning Man and for his ability to draw.

Automated Corporate and Nonprofitarchitectures of the future will have to develop incredible tools for continuous management and decision-making, as well as constituent agreements in the form of code.

11. Gig economy will become very popular

People who participated in the Second World War throughout their lives had worked at one or two jobs. Today we have five or six jobs.

People of the future will work in five or six jobs at the same time.

Half of the sources of income will beautomated and passive, such as cryptocurrency guaranteed income. Artificial intelligence will pick up your work. Cars will know your capabilities and skills and in a short time will pick you vacancies. You don’t even have to look for work.

Imagine such a software projectsoftware that needs insanely huge code, about ten trillion lines. Software projects are becoming more complex and growing. Artificial intelligence will write and test the first half, and people will write the second half. The project will work in a distributed decentralized system that offers and distributes tasks, acts as a project manager and offers work to programmers in a worldwide network based on reputation and skills.

Imagine Github AI married to UpWork and Mechanical Turk.

Such a system could be used for the production and any other work of blue-collar workers, which can create a large gap between the rich and the poor today.

Hong Kong Subway Artificial Intelligence,perhaps the first prototype of such a network, although this is not an ideal analogy. He warns of upcoming problems in the subway and sends engineers data before the incident. This provides the busiest metro in the world with permanent 99% operation.

Most of the functions will be managed by external reputation banks based on the blockchain, which will become the social credit of the future.

It will be both good and very, very bad.

The dark side is a social credit systemChina, which today is very similar to the Black Mirror series. Everything will surely get worse when states start using reputational banks to cram their ideology into people's throats.

But open reputation banks with common management will help us make connections, work and understand who we can trust in business and in ordinary life.

This will be a double edged sword.

The main problem is that veryfew people can agree on what is good and what is bad in the system, and ideology seeks to turn these concepts into something completely illegible. It will be incredibly simple to create a set of rules that will make us all slaves if we are not careful.

Kings of disagreement

I just made the simplest predictions. Now let's talk about the few that can cause heated debate and disagreement in society.

12. Blockchain will open the way to all kinds of evil

Fans of cryptocurrencies will have to reach an agreement that the blockchain will open as many bad opportunities as good ones.

There is nothing absolutely good or absolutelybad. Everything exists at the same time. With a gun, you can kill someone or feed your family by going hunting. Water supports life, but in it you can drown, you can be poisoned in it.

If you are currently developing a system usingDevOps “move fast and break everything” approach, then be aware that this approach is likely to be destructive for systems that can algorithmically control many aspects of our lives.

Instead, you need to slow down, think and not break everything.

You need to think through all the ways of destruction.system, otherwise you cannot protect it. It would be naive not to calculate all the ways your enemies can use the blockchain, those who do not share your views on openness, freedom and cooperation.

I have already completed half of the article entitled“If Hitler had a blockchain.” Honestly, I don’t want to publish it, because I don’t want to give bad guys fresh ideas, but rest assured, this may not help them much. Their dark minds are already working hard to find a way to use blockchain as a system of repression and control.

I intentionally throw dust in my eyes so as not to let outall ideas into a collective unconscious, but think about digitally tracking all aspects of your life, where you are going and what you are doing, the statistical calculation of your behavior, as well as the behavioral algorithms that motivate you to agree with ideology, and, in the end, Think of invulnerable digital rights management and open genocide.

Genocide?

Yes.

Do not forget that IBM helped the Nazis inHolocaust by offering them perforated cards to track victims. What could they do with the blockchain? Answer: there are even more terrible and bloody crimes that we can only remotely imagine.

Do you think that an open system will forever free you from oppression?

Not true.

If the Internet has taught us anything, it is only because open systems lead to centralization and, over time, central forces subordinate and ruin any system for their own purposes.

If you are working on a cryptocurrency and do not think about all the ways to abuse it, then most likely, instead of creating a system that will save the world, you will create a prison for it.

13. Bitcoin Chances of Survival - 50/50

Most real Bitcoin supporters will not like this, but there is a good chance that this cryptocurrency has a 50/50 chance of survival.

I know I know. You already heard about it! The money hunter cannot be stopped! New price record !!!! Buy and keep forever!

Since you have read most of my article, then linger a little longer, and I will explain what's what.

Firstly, I hope that Bitcoin will live to the end of my days. But let's look from an objective point of view. Why can he fail? Perhaps not for the reason you came up with.

Bitcoin has the pioneer advantage. This is absolutely the first of its kind cryptocurrency, which still occupy a large share of the entire market, but also has major shortcomings that can kill it.

We can say that Bitcoin is a Model T of the blockchain revolution.

How many Model T cars can be seen on the streets today?

Is it possible to modify Model T so that the car breaks down like a Lamborghini? Is it possible to equip it with modern electronics so that it can ride on its own, like the Tesla? Not.

First, Bitcoin does not have a built-in systemmanagement. This is a significant drawback. And there are only a few ways to fix it. The first is to make a proposal that almost everyone has to agree with, which is incredibly difficult, as we saw with SegWit. This change has been accepted for several years.

The second way is to create a new project and hard fork.for him. Perhaps this is the only way that success will ultimately provide. The development team can create a fork and build control into it, but this is unlikely.

A coin with carefully designed, large-scale and integrated controls will have a huge advantage over Bitcoin and can easily be replaced thanks to the easy implementation of updates.

Updates and protection against attacks by well-financed hostile forces should develop very quickly and be implemented in the network within a few hours or days, and not several years.

What about scaling? We have already talked about this problem. Resizing the block will not fix the problem. Something more radical is needed.

What if China disables the Great Firewall? Will the country be able to improve private relaying and other system security code at this stage?

What if governments decide to spend a billion dollars on a data center and develop secret ASICs? Will miners be able to compete with them?

What if opponents decide to eliminate all the major developers? How difficult will it be to replace them, given their incredible talent in the world of cryptocurrencies?

And these are just a few almost insurmountablethe problems of my favorite cryptocurrency. I talk about them not in order to kill bitcoin, but in order to make people think. If you see a problem, then you can find a solution to it. But if we solve only such imaginary problems as the size of the block, then this will not lead to anything.

Bitcoin is a great, great idea,which has already changed the world. Bitcoin will fail not because it is fake or scam, but because of its own rules with complex code, because of internal contradictions and lack of control.

Of course, bitcoin will not necessarily fail. We can now begin to think how to save him. Right here and now.

As I noted earlier, it’s not easy to provideSome types of visualizations and containers can survive and prosper, which will allow Bitcoin to adapt and develop, turn it into an abstract set of protocols and protections.

I hope so. I bet that if you read this, then you have the same opinion.

The best way to ensure his survival is to understand all the real reasons why he may fail, and to start creating real solutions to problems today, before they appear.

The Last Frontier

I have many other predictions, but I will save them for my book. Maybe I will write a sequel if this article is popular.

Also, I have not set out to you some particularly evilideas, because I don’t want them to become a reality. If someone else sets them out, I won’t be able to do anything, but my keyboard will not become the source of the worst Monte Carlo scripts of the future.

Cryptocurrencies will be a fundamental updateeconomic systems of the world. As soon as they become fully operational and integrated into the world and interplanetary networks of the future, the world will look completely different. We are just starting to imagine this world.

After hundreds of years, today's economy will look like the feudal economy of the past.

Cryptocurrencies, decentralized applications and DAOmay lead us to a post-deficit Startrek economy, but it will take time. I'm not saying that thanks to the singularity, we will get there tomorrow, even if I sprinkle all my science fiction work with the singularity, because it is very good literature. Perhaps this will not happen.

If I am mistaken, then my busy virtual mind, which is in the global fog of computer science in a "brain-doll", will just have to come to terms with this. But I doubt it.

What turns out? Cryptocurrency will bring us both good and bad, like everything else in our lives. By working on a cryptocurrency, you are building the world of the future, but do not expect it to come soon next week.

Inertia reduces the acceleration of even the fastest missiles.

Just enjoy a trip to where no one has ever been before.