Bitcoin doomed? – As a blockchain co-founder Ethereum (ETH), Vitalik Buterin regularly expresses his vision of the future of the ETH network. In a recent interview, however, he presented more general predictions for cryptocurrencies, in particular on Bitcoin (BTC). And according to Vitalik, the king of cryptos is likely to know a big problem in his future.
Cryptos in 2040: less volatility and an established place?
With the very next merger of the Ethereum Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) networks – The Merge – the immediate future is likely to be as exciting as it is turbulent. One of the main co-founders of this crypto project, Vitalik Buterin, however, takes a higher view, and considers the more distant future of the cryptocurrency industry.
In an interview with the blogger Noah Smiththe young 28-year-old developer announces that he is convinced that, in the medium term:
“(…) cryptocurrencies will stabilize and be about as volatile as gold or the stock market. The main question is at what price level they will stabilize. (…) If, in 2040, cryptocurrencies have firmly established themselves in a few niches: they replace the value store aspect of gold, they become a kind of “Linux of finance”, an alternative financial layer, always available, which ends up being the background for really important things, but which doesn’t quite take over the mainstream (…). »
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For Vitalik Buterin, Bitcoin may end up losing interest for miners
If he is optimistic for the class of crypto-assets in general, Vitalik Buterin shows himself more worried for the future of today’s most important cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.
Why ? Well the problem would come from halvings successive programs programmed in the code of the network created by Satoshi Nakamoto. Approximately every 4 years, these phenomena divide by two the block reward that miners get by validating batches of transactions on the BTC blockchain.
Thus, in May 2020, this reward is went from 12.5 to 6.25 bitcoins. In 2024, it will go from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC, and so on… What to end up with to discourage minors according to Vitalik:
“A consensus system that unnecessarily costs huge amounts of electricity is not only bad for the environment, it also requires hundreds of thousands of BTC or ETH to be issued every year. [Avec les halvings,] emissions will eventually be reduced to close to zero (…), but Bitcoin will then have to face another problem: how to ensure that it remains secure? (…) The security of Bitcoin will then be entirely ensured by the fees [de transaction](…) which are [actuellement] around $300,000 a day, and haven’t really increased in the last five years. »
In the eyes of Vitalik Buterin, all this justifies the choice to move Ethereum from the Proof of Work consensus to that of Proof of Stake. For their part, advocates of the PoW consensus believe that PoS poses a plutocracy problemwhere the most rich ETH owners will have a lot more influence on the governance of the network than the most modest.
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