In ten years, Bitcoin will be more than just a minor player in global finance.  It will be deeply integrated into the worldwide monetary system.  Digital gold is too narrow a term - this is a basic change in how value gets stored and moved.  This will happen even as traditional government-backed currencies keep declining.   

Governments will try to regulate it, sure, but their efforts may actually hasten adoption by making it seem more valid.  There is a seismic shift underway in money and transactions, with Bitcoin positioned to be a core building block of the new financial architecture.

I too am worried about the direction we are taking, and I would have love to have said that "at least we have bitcointalk" however the admin won't even make a privacy and cybersecurity board, succumb to mixer bans (even though we could instead encourage decentralized privacy protocol development) and the forum remains stagnant in its evolution.

The wider outlook looks grim. People are exactly what the adversary wanted them to be, numb, dumb and enslaved by debt. Even if there was a spark of passion and care for financial sovereignty and care for human rights like privacy, there is really not much a single person can do anymore. The internet itself is hardly a tool for freedom anymore, instead serving and being used as an infinite content machine and at this stage, an unregulated tool for unproductive activity and borderline illegitimate business practices.

It is such a shame that this is where we are in 2025, and fear what 2030 and 2035 look like based on the current direction. I hope some of the things I am working on offline and online will make some form of impact.

Sorry for the delay, forgot about this thread and didn't see your answer.

The point I'm trying to make is the following: Decentralization and privacy, i.e. censorship resistance, comes with a lot of real-life advantages many investors seek actively. The big selling point here is that nobody can take the Bitcoins away from you (at least not legally). For example, many people buy Bitcoin because they distrust their governments or their country's economy, or fiat money. They hope that in the case of a crisis when all other assets implode, even if gold etc. gets confiscated, their Bitcoins will still be left for them, and that nobody can take them away.

That selling point only works if the Bitcoins can't be intervened by any state, and that nobody can be censored, at least inside of the Bitcoin network.

Thus I expect that a less censorship-resistant Bitcoin can also address only a smaller market. If it bubbles up to a million USD for example, it could crash hard quite soon if the investor group I mentioned above sells, and people discover that it has no advantages anymore versus other assets.

You mentioned the success of ETFs in another post as a counter-argument. But the ETFs are proving that point at least a little bit, too. Because they are not only an IOU, but actually legally transfer the Bitcoin ownership to the ETF investor. This wouldn't help you if you're a criminal and it's discovered that you deposited "dirty" funds to buy ETFs -- then you could get censored by the authorities and the ETF firm would have to abide. But in all "legal" contexts the Bitcoins are yours and nobody can take them away from you. That's why Bitcoin financial products before the ETFs were much less attractive to investors. Okay, in an extreme crisis where gold gets confiscated ETFs may see the same fate, but it's still better than a stock ETF which crashes to almost zero in such a collapse. And there are many intermediate scenarios where Bitcoin ETFs are still a quite good option.

Bitcoin is the future, that's basically the premise.

For now it's the store of value, but what comes next is uncertain - though we can clearly say that it would be beneficial for BTC one way or another.

You can read all sorts of things here. Most people haven’t even taken a couple of hours to study and understand the basic technical and economic aspects of Bitcoin.

 Bitcoin is money based on consensus  and that's the key point many people still fail to understand.

There is no institution that decides what Bitcoin is. There is no CEO, no bank, no government, and no central point of control. Instead, ordinary people around the world run their own nodes, follow the rules they choose, and collectively protect the network from any form of centralization.

Bitcoin is not imposed from above. People adopt it voluntarily . as a store of value, protection against inflation, or as a form of permissionless money.

It’s a system where rules aren’t changed by majority vote, but only through the technical and economic consensus of the users who actually run the network.

If we have knowledge about Bitcoin, we won't have to think about it for so long. So we have to first learn about it, only then will we be able to do something better and analyze its good and bad results.

They don't pay attention to Bitcoin money, they don't like the way it's earned, which is why they're at a huge disadvantage, just like they were with Bitcoin in the beginning.

Yes, this is a business and a decentralized Blockchain that no one can tamper with, due to which these things are not even around it and nothing can harm them. And they also grow because of Bitcoin because those who withdraw money from Bitcoin keep most of it in the bank and this will be of great benefit to their bank account and their growth.

I think that whenever the government intervenes in Bitcoin, it means that they are gradually trying to centralize the government's control here, otherwise how did the price of Bitcoin increase so quickly? I think that it may be a long-term process that the government is trying to control. And Bitcoin is a decentralized currency that works on its own system, so if it continues like this in the future, it may have a big impact on Bitcoin. If the purpose for which Bitcoin started its journey continues like this, it will become purposeless. Through this, Bitcoin can disrupt its own independence or its main system. However, we, the common people, will invest in Bitcoin with the main purpose of investing here and thinking about how to profit from it. I don't think they have much thought about it.

Whats the assurance that they aren't doing that right now, I mean Bitcoin is big you know, there is no any institution from any country that will see one coin worth $100k and not be tempted to be involved in it, they will be tasty to have it. However, pushing protocol is one thing but Bitcoin is decentralized, it's not like they are group of people in what place that run Bitcoin. If the government push for any protocol, most miners and nodes runners wouldn't accept it.

Who do you think controls the Bitcoin, they are majorly miners. There hasn't been any group of people that has been supportive like miners from different part of the world. If government push any Bitcoin and ask,people to update it, nobody will accept it because anyone who knows the true meaning of Bitcoin and the value will know for a certain that Bitcoin is a freedom, it was created to help one fight censorship resistance, if the government decides to show who they are, Bitcoin is going to be that guy they will reject they accepted.

I think 10 years is a long time, and since it's a technological asset, in fact, related to such a particular characteristic that includes volatility, it will be very difficult to predict its financial status. However, the regulatory process will certainly have well-defined and conclusive phases in the legal aspect, and the truth is, I hope it's one of those paths that is defined globally at future.

I knew this would happen the moment we got that ETF approval because it was like the stamp of approval that institutional investors with big bags and extremely deep pockets. iirc, a lot of people on the forum wanted mass adoption in the users and for Bitcoin price numbers to go up which was why the ETF news waa well received after it was approved. A bit of centralized holding is the price we hsve to pay. Institutions like Microstrategy will going buying bitcoin until they can't thus they're likely to become the biggest bitcoin holders.