An interesting blog post was published by former Bitcoin developer, Gavin Andresen on September 21st. He talked about a potential bitcoin future in the blog post and it outlines a theoretical situation for the network in 2061, where most transactions would not happen on the bitcoin network. In 2010, after Satoshi Nakamoto’s departure from Bitcoin’s network, it was Gavin Andersen who was regarded as the lead maintainer of the software, as Nakamoto had left the keys to him. Mike Hearn, another Bitcoin developer, claimed in 2011 that he had received an email from Bitcoin’s creator, which said that he had ‘moved to other things.
However, he said that the man had also said that Bitcoin was in good hands with Gavin Andresen. But, it should be noted that he is no longer the lead maintainer and hasn’t been an active Bitcoin Core developer for years. Previously, he had shared his opinion about wallet privacy as well as Ethereum’s Tornado mixing protocol. In January 2018, Andresen had also had a discussion about the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network. Now, it appears that the Bitcoin developer has something to say about the Bitcoin (BTC) Network itself. He said that people should consider his blog post a piece of science fiction.
But, he did add that of all the possible things that can happen in the future, this has the highest chances of happening. He mentioned the year 2061 and said that Bitcoin’s price would be around $6 million, which is the equivalent of $1 million today, due to inflation. Miners would be rewarded 0.006103515625 per block and the transaction fee for about 4,000 transactions would be 5 BTC, which would be around $7,500 for every transaction. The most important point was that these transactions wouldn’t happen on the Bitcoin Network.
He said that most of the bitcoins would be locked up in multisignature wallets that would be secured with multiparty computation. He added that they would be mirrored as ‘wrapped’ tokens on another chain. He went on to say that people decided to move their bitcoins because they either wanted lower fees, quicker transactions, further privacy, or just wanted to invest their BTC into the world of decentralized finance. The transactions that would occur on the BTC network would be of high value, mostly it would be whales like central banks, centralized exchanges and decentralized addresses that would have all the wrapped coins.
It is possible that this theory turns into a reality because there is currently a lot of synthetic or wrapped bitcoin in use on other blockchains. According to Dune Analytics, the number of bitcoins leveraged via Ethereum is around 269,642 and it is spread across a total of seven projects. There are a total of 205,921 coins that can be found on the Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC) project. Andresen continued his theoretical post by saying that the super whales would gain control of the BTC network forever and they would be the transaction creators and miners and wouldn’t worry about the increase in transaction fee because they would get as much as they pay.
