Bitcoin: what was, what is and what probably will be

Introduction

Published in

Coinmonks

5 min readApr 10, 2021

Since its inception in the ’00s [1], cryptocurrencies have matured into a well-established innovative market, actually encompassing a big family of encrypted coins, stable coins, tokens, and other digital financial assets with distinct mechanisms and technologies, arousing the great interest of investors, entrepreneurs, regulators and the general public [2]. However, how can beginners distinguish serious projects from scams in this huge world of cryptocurrencies?
For this purpose, an interesting series will be illustrated in this channel by investigating the past, present, and future of each cryptocurrency. The objective of this series is to help beginners with studies on the cryptocurrency market as position preservation and how to detect a serious project.
This paper introduces our big star Bitcoin, the first successful case of the crypto world and Bitcoin is a great example, because the community has since grown exponentially with many developers working on Bitcoin [3].

What was Bitcoin?

Bitcoin was enabled by an open-source software called Bitcoin Core. The software is stored on Github [4]. But what is Github? It is the social network where programmers store their projects and network with like-minded people. In other words, it is a social network of developers and geeks where serious projects are hosted. From 2014 until date, the developer Wladimir van der Laan is the current maintainer of Bitcoin Core software [5].

What is Bitcoin?

Bitcoin, in a few words, is an innovative digital currency. But what is behind Bitcoin Core software? There are 51,700 ‘stargazers’, people who observe the program, 28,300 forks, copies of the repository, 3,800 watchers, persons monitoring all activity, including me, 569 issues, tasks and bugs to solve, 397 pull requests, the heart of collaboration on GitHub, 34 versions and 28 members, the great guy’s admin, including the genius van der Laan. This is an incredible and vibrating community that performs a janitorial role of the project goals (Figure 01).

Up to date, the Bitcoin market cap is $1T. CoinMarketCap website tracks 306 cryptocurrency spot exchanges and 56 top decentralized exchanges [6] in a market that is currently growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 197%, the return of every year for 10 years on a compound basis.
According to Buy Bitcoin Worldwide, we are a community of ~100 million Bitcoin owners and ~53 million Bitcoin traders using ~200 million Bitcoin wallets [7]. The number of users has grown by ~40% per year.

What probably will be Bitcoin?

It is a hard job and uncertainly to project the future. For example, at the actual speed, we probably will be more than 1 billion Bitcoin owners next decade. As can be observed (Figure 2), the total of wallets could reach 5 billion in 2035, expanding the real data from Glassnode [8].

Figure 2. The number of Bitcoin wallets.

The annual growth rate of Bitcoin price is decreasing after each halving. In a previous paper [9], I showed that a linear combination of prior bitcoin waves could help us to investigate the next waves, culminated in an interesting price model called Bitcoin Waves. In this way, the Bitcoin Waves model was applied to the next halving (Figure 3), according to the model the predicted price could reach more than $1M after 2024 halving.

Finally, in Figures 4 and 5, 2028 and 2032 waves are shown concerning the possible prices (USD). It has not escaped my notice that the specific growth rate for 2032 I have calculated was 1.617 immediately suggests a possible similarity with the golden ratio of 1.618. According to the model the predicted price could reach more than $6M after 2032 halving.

Conclusion

In summary, the Bitcoin network presented an interesting creation, a strong programmer’s community and now, Bitcoin is aging and will become the beloved grandfather of all cryptocurrencies, probably being the unit of account for them. This is not financial advice.

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Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Satoshi Nakamoto, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Changpeng Zhao, Sabrina Moraes, Fernando Ulrich, André Fauth, Criptomaníacos, and Vela Trader.

References

1. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

2. Cryptocurrencies: market analysis and perspectives | SpringerLink

3. Bitcoin — Open source P2P money

4. www.github.com

5. laanwj (W. J. van der Laan) (github.com)

6. https://coinmarketcap.com/rankings/exchanges/

7. https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/how-many-bitcoin-users/#:~:text=But%20there%20are%20only%20~20.5,more%20than%20~20.5%20million%20owners.

8. www.studio.glassnode.com

9. Bitcoin Waves: A linear combination for price modeling | by Edgar Moraes | Coinmonks | Mar, 2021 | Medium