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- The developer predicts a scenario 4-5 decades down the line that transactions will happen on a mirrored chain and only whales will transact on the main chain.
- He also predicts that all incentives on mining will be lost after which even the whales will withdraw and zero BTC will be produced on the network.
We have come a long way in the development of the Bitcoin blockchain and the overall network. However, Gavin Andresen, a former lead developer has dropped off some concerning matters relating to the future of Bitcoin.
In his recent blog post “A Possible BTC Future”, Andresen predicts the demise of the Bitcoin blockchain network. The lead developer predicts a future scenario going into 2061 wherein the BTC price has reached $6 million per coin. Well, he also notes that 40 years down the line $6 million will be equal to $1 million today.
He further notes that transaction fees will be around $7,500, however, most transactions will not occur on the network as per Andresen. Rather they will happen on a mirrored chain using wrapped tokens to save on fees and improve speeds. Andresen writes:
But most BTC transactions don’t happen on the BTC network. Most BTC is locked up in multisignature outputs secured using multiparty computation and mirrored on another chain as “wrapped” tokens. People moved their BTC either because they want faster transactions, lower fees, more privacy, or want to invest their BTC in decentralized financial stuff. Or maybe all of the above.
The lead developer further notes that whales would be dominating the transactions taking place on the main Bitcoin network. These transactions will be of very high value happening between super whale-size holders. Thus, these whales will maintain the BTC network forever. Andresen notes that these whales are the miners and the transaction creators. “They don’t care how high transaction fees go, because they receive as many fees as they pay,” he writes.
Bitcoin mining fee will drop to near zero
By 2100, Andresen expects that the Bitcoin mining fee will drop to near zero. Meaning, these big whales will have no more incentives to continue with mining and serve as network validators. Thus he further notes:
In the year 2100 the whales notice that the mining reward is basically zero, and there are fewer and fewer transactions happening on the slow, expensive, zero-privacy BTC network. So they decide to simplify and save money by shutting it down.
One by one the whales will shut down the bridges that move BTC between chains. Furthermore, they will burn any BTC locked on the BTC chain by sending it to the 0x0000 address. This will make sure that nobody can ever spend it on the BTC network.
Thus, the last case scenario is that there are zero new Bitcoins produced on the Bitcoin blockchain and nearly zero BTC circulating on the network. Since there’s nothing more left to secure, the chain will stop.
Of course, all these predictions are entirely hypothetical, however, looking at the time frame and the way the network has been progressing, the possibility of this happening is not entirely nill.
