My prediction: Bitcoin will be remembered as the first successful application of a new wave in decentralized technologies. However Bitcoin itself will not be used except in museums, like the first Google server.
The revolution is how decentralized technologies from the past (BitTorrent, GNUtilla, DHT, etc) met with cryptography and game theory. Even more revolutionary is the wave of consumer-facing cryptographic identity tools, libraries, and browsers. By tying the notion of Public-Private keys to the metaphor of wallets (hence value) incentivizes end-users to keep and protect their keys. Decentralized Internet-level consensus combined with widely distributed cryptographic tools is huge!
Bitcoin's durability for years demonstrated the resiliency of these tools under the pressure of a hostile open Internet. It was the first serious test. And it passed with flying colors.
I DO believe that forks from the Bitcoin network will proliferate for a while. Bitcoin's technical and governance problems will doom it, but the value it has now will be distributed to finance other projects (e.g.: Ethereum) that will move the space and technology forward.
The revolution is how decentralized technologies from the past (BitTorrent, GNUtilla, DHT, etc) met with cryptography and game theory. Even more revolutionary is the wave of consumer-facing cryptographic identity tools, libraries, and browsers. By tying the notion of Public-Private keys to the metaphor of wallets (hence value) incentivizes end-users to keep and protect their keys. Decentralized Internet-level consensus combined with widely distributed cryptographic tools is huge!
Bitcoin's durability for years demonstrated the resiliency of these tools under the pressure of a hostile open Internet. It was the first serious test. And it passed with flying colors.
I DO believe that forks from the Bitcoin network will proliferate for a while. Bitcoin's technical and governance problems will doom it, but the value it has now will be distributed to finance other projects (e.g.: Ethereum) that will move the space and technology forward.