Long ago, i believed that as any crypto figured out better ways to run a blockchain, that it would just be absorbed into bitcoin. "It's just software, it can be updated."
And so, bitcoin would be doing a block every 3 seconds, or variable block sizes or something. But, it looks like i was wrong. But, now they are talking about putting Ordinals on the bitcoin blockchain…
Now, what i am seeing is that bitcoin is going to stay old and slow, but the rest of the crypto space is going to be linked to or hung off of bitcoin.
And this may be the best thing for crypto.
The future of bitcoin (not lightning or chainlink or wrapped)
In the not so distant future, if you do not have a million dollar transaction, it is too small to get it on the bitcoin blockchain.
And so, there will be a problem with people who bought a few million satoshis. And that will probably be worked out. At some point, the bitcoin coders will think it is wise to move all the dust to a lightning (or similar) node. (because dust is now several thousand dollars).
Then, the future transactions will be something like, Send bitcoin to address. Subtract Tx fee. And send the rest of the previous Tx to lightning node, if it is below "dust level" (this will be defined in the future)
As bitcoin gets to millions of dollars. And satoshis stop being fractions of a cent, but dollars themselves, then dust is going to become a big issue. And, since it is that big, and there is that much money tied up, someone will come up with a solution.
On the other side, there will become far better bitcoin wallets. That will sync with eachother, and make sure all things are correct before initiating a transfer. The transfers, of course, will be millions of dollars. So, of course, there will be ways to check it and double check it, and maybe even a way to abort 9 minutes after enter was hit.
Think of the way we hand large piles of gold. Putting it on a navy ship, with military escorts and people to sign for it every step of the way. Such will come to bitcoin.
The future of bitcoin - all those other things (lightning / wrapped / chainlink)
This is where things get strange, from a programmer point of view, and very seamless and atomic for normies. The chain-to-chain swaps will become truly easy, if not atomic. The ways of handling a "chunk" of bitcoin will become numerous, but your wallet will handle that. You will just know that the tall-venti-latte with extra caramel was paid for.
Lightning networks will become slightly different. As in, they will never go back to the bitcoin chain (too expensive) and so, other ways of handling balancing nodes will happen.
Maybe we will used wrapped bitcoin. And the lightning nodes will send that between themselves.
All that i really know is that we will come up with ways of holding, saving, and spending ONE SATOSHI. Because a satoshi will be that important to the normal person. And, if the person wants to store that one sat in a hardware wallet to be safe forever, then that needs to be doable.
Of course this is doable, and people are working on it. But i can only guess how it will be done in the future. I expect much surprises and really well coded solutions.
The other coins
This is one of those weird things. We need something better than lightning, and something less than a $million bitcoin on chain transaction. So, what and where are those?
This is where i believe other coins will be used. Litecoin, BitcoinCash… Doge. And with cross chain transactions, then these can be used as "same-as-bitcoin" transactions.
The question is, do we end up with one chain in the future with multiple layers/multiple chains? So, it is all bitcoin? Maybe.
But, in the short term (less than 10 years) we will see a serious uptick in alt-coin usage.
As bitcoin becomes more expensive. You know, out of the reach of a normal person ever even thinking of owning a whole bitcoin, then we will see people piling into the alts.
And, it will be weird, as certain groups of people start using certain coins.
Like, if Musk got off his ass, and pushed the go button, and Doge was sendable through twitter/X, then we would see groups of X'ites who send Doge back and forth for payments/tips/super-chats. (other platforms may adopt other cryptos)
Litecoin has put a lot of effort into selling businesses on using litecoin. It could easily become the payment network in B2B (business to business)
I expect lots of these silos to form naturally. (and some manipulatedly)
But, these will just be stepping stones, as all the chains merge into one because atomic swaps happen seamlessly.
However, stepping stones seem to be VERY important to the average person. They can't just jump straight to all bitcoin, all the time. (and bitcoin couldn't handle that right now) So, we take smaller steps.
In the end, everything is priced in bitcoin.
And this will be the way of things, the way of payment, as the dollar/euro/BRICS dies.
However, from my view, this is just the first step in a process leading to real money.
Bitcoin is not real money, it is just the best form of solid money we have come up with. It has a small, but known, inflation. And so, will be deflationary (if the economy continues to grow) This will be super-fantastic for our future, compared to the inflationary fiat currency we have today.
But, there are many problems that we will need to work through. Like, usury. Bitcoin loans cannot have interest applied to them. People, who are used to inflationary fiat currency will baulk at this. But, we had better learn it, or we will see the destruction of bitcoin. (There needs to be enough money to pay the principal AND interest of ALL loans. Else, the slowest person defaults. And so, since there isn't more bitcoin for paying interest, then interest cannot be applied to loans. However, when you lend bitcoin to say, build a bridge, you get the same bitcoin back, but you also have a bridge, so your bitcoin is worth a bridge more than it was. So, you do not need interest on the loans)
We will work these things out. Including electricity for everyone and internet for everyone, everywhere.
But, most importantly, we start having sound money.