Bitcoin development and innovation looks to be facing a dead end. 🪦 A friend of mine pointed this out to me the other day, and he's right.
Note:
⚠️ This is not saying "Bitcoin's dead" or that the price will crash! ⚠️
I'm talking specifically about the "Bitcoin-native" development roadmap, and how all of the big hyped initiatives just haven't panned out.
Segwit was massively hyped as a scaling solution, but ended up being a tiny, inefficient, and opt-in block size increase.
Lightning was massively hyped as being so big it would obsolete the whole rest of crypto! 🤣 But, despite still being worked on and used by some institutions, it has largely, and spectacularly, fallen on its face. No one saying "Lightning will change everything" is taken seriously anymore.
Then we have Taproot, which didn't really change much. Sure it enabled some extra stuff, but it was just an incremental change that didn't lead to any significant killer apps.
Fedimints/ecash/etc. turned out to be something with Lightning-esque complexity yet fully custodial, which is the worst of all worlds. It's not going anywhere.
Finally we have OP_CAT, which is basically stalled out from lack of "consensus" or whatever. Not sure what it does, not sure I care because it probably won't happen.
Nothing cool happens on Bitcoin anymore.
However, other blockchains are picking up the slack.
Kraken just released their wrapped Bitcoin on ETH, there's stuff like tBTC, v4v lets Hive users instantly bridge HBD out to Bitcoin, etc. Lots of examples.
Bitcoin will still persist for quite a long time. However, all the "maximalist-sanctioned" scaling solutions and other cool stuff is essentially dead at this point. Other "non-sanctioned" and "shitcoin" chains and projects will do the cool Bitcoin stuff from now on.
Bitcoin's network will just be to move from custodian to custodian, or to bridge to superior networks. That's basically it.
You heard it here first. Bet on it on Polymarket or something, I don't know. 😁