The next ten years?

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How do you see the future of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency evolving over the next decade?

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I have a specific vision of the future regarding blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies geared more toward what I’m trying to accomplish with another project I’m working on.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.
A. Lincoln

Here goes my two cents:

  1. More regulation: This is a double-edged sword; more regulations around cryptocurrencies mean we will be more limited in innovation, but it also means users will be safe. I don’t like the current model of users blindly trusting a project because it has an audit or because blockchain is “secure.” Most people don’t even know what security means in this context.

  2. Less decentralization: We will never be able to educate people about blockchains and cryptocurrencies fully. People don’t even know how regular money works, and even if they start understanding crypto, they’re faced with a technology that keeps evolving. In its traditional sense, money is a debt bill; you exchange X amount of time, resources, or any other valuable thing to society, and you get K amount of money in return. You can now use this K amount of money to get X amount of work or resources elsewhere. That’s a dumb way of making unwritten contracts, but cryptocurrencies are more intelligent than that; you can program any deal into the blockchain and code every agreement. It’s no longer a simple exchange. Although, most cryptocurrencies today still follow the traditional money model. I predict we will at least see the rise of cryptocurrency banks, agencies, and brokers who handle the complicated stuff on behalf of the users. For many users, even setting up a wallet is complicated; then, you have tax, AML, insurance, audits, and many other things.

  3. More creative ways to handle money: As mentioned in the previous point, blockchains are more intelligent than the dumb money we take daily. For now, most cryptocurrencies follow the same model as fiat money, but I’m expecting to see more creative ways of making contracts of value exchange in the future.

  4. More non-financial use cases: Blockchains are a great technology, and their focus on the financial use case limits their adoption. I expect more blockchain projects like ICP, Arweave, and Helium.

  5. More efficient: Our knowledge and research on zero-knowledge proofs and trusted execution are still in their early stages. That’s why we have consensus mechanisms in the blockchain; it’s a way to prove an execution, or a piece of data is not altered. There will be methods in the future to run computations in a trusted way without the need for consensus or achieving security via decentralization.

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Regulation, from my perspective, only protects the corporations and not the people. But I do live in the United States of Corruption, so I might be biased. I’d rather see more transparency and DAOs in crypto than control by the governments who are controlled by the 1%.

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I think we’ve only seen the infancy of cryptocurrency and blockchain world so far.
In the next few years there’ll be more regulations and widespread adaptation imho.

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the idealist within me would like to say that it’s going to become widely adopted, but seeing the highly speculative nature of crypto in general, one can’t help but wonder if it is enabling the very dystopian future that many of us are afraid of?

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