My personal opinion on the fate of bitcoin!

The blockchain is considered one of the great developments of the internet era because of its ability to run in the distributed network yet without requiring any trust amongst the parties involved.

A number of other technologies are required to create a functioning blockchain network, such as asymmetric cryptography, data network, consensus protocol, data storage space, database and so on. All the ingredients required for blockchain were already available well before we learned about blockchain from Satoshi Nakamoto. Some researchers were using cryptography and computational power for achieving different results. One example of such usage is the HashCash, a collaborative email spam filtering algorithm. What I am trying to highlight here is that some form of blockchain like technology were in use earlier too, but it was not popular.

The credit goes to the bitcoin for making blockchain technology so much popular where it attracted the attention of all kind of professionals. Also, people show interest where money is. It is obvious. Bitcoin's value started from virtually zero to more than USD 19,000 when the price of bitcoin was ascended in the exponential form in 2017.

I think the price of bitcoin will never reach again to the height it went in late 2017, and the only way will be to go down and down. While it might hurt a lot to many "HODLers" who are holding their bitcoin for the retirement or with any other speculative purpose, the scenario shows such.

Well, I have put forward my opinion about the future price of bitcoin, but remember that it is absolutely my personal opinion and I might be proven wrong. But, I also guess that you deserve to demand an explanation from me on what ground have I made this speculation.

I hear, here you go ...
Bitcoin taught us how a trustless network can be established using blockchain technology. It has also demonstrated us the most powerful distributed pool of computers from the computational point of view. It has also demonstrated that billions of dollars can be left open on the table where all hackers, enthusiasts, researchers can try to break in but without a success. I think bitcoin has done a lot for us, so far. We should thank the inventor, core developers and many more who were involved in it. But it's time to move forward.

On the flip side, bitcoin has clearly shown us that it cannot be used as a "store of value" token due to its volatility, oh my god. It has no network capacity to serve enterprise level applications, sometimes taking weeks to process the transactions, even with the suggested fee amount. It is not a smart contract platform. I know it can be, after all its a software code, but at least not until now. As a response, there have been many new approaches to improve the consensus protocol to meet the enterprise needs, we all know it.

Despite hostile activity from established business houses, banks to kill bitcoin, it has shown the resiliency until now. Also, many developers are working day and night to improve the consensus protocol to scale out for the enterprise-grade deployment of the blockchain. The initiation is taken from the private sectors, well this is the beauty of the free market economy. Money raised from crowdfunding has become a great source of funding for protocol developments. But, the bitcoin that showed us the road of blockchain might slowly be fading out from the scene, but not quietly but hurting many investors. This is not unusual in the technology space. We all like a generation-9 Intel i7 processor than the Pentium 1, don't we?

The massive roller coaster of bitcoin price, its volatility is greatly impacting other highly prospective projects. People may slowly move their investments to the newly evolving technology and will gradually abandon bitcoin, reluctantly letting it die. Soon a day may come when 10,000 bitcoins will not be enough to buy a regular pizza on a bitcoin-pizza day.