Discuss!
My answer is this: There will be insane daily increasing competition between the various countries to install more miners than the other guy has. Basically, an arms race of bitcoin mining. Insane successors of ASICs and successors of nuclear energy will be researched and developed. AI will be near perfect and Moore's Law would have gone bonkers due to the insane advanced in processing power developing daily. My line of reasoning is this: I won't say how much I think Bitcoin will be priced in 2140, because I don't want to be laughed at, but basically 1 sat would be able to buy a nice cup of coffee. By this time, anyway, fiat would have long gone and a non-existent concept, bitcoin would be the de-facto reserve currency globally. No shitcoins would exist, having long expunged and sent to "burn" addresses after several Vitaliks tried to rug-pull people in the big boom of '27. These days every kid (programming is now a standard subject in kindergarten) can make personal blockchains for fun and trade toys or trinkets on them and they do. So right before 2140, in 2139, what could be considered trillions in today's fiat value were being spent on developing ever faster mining machines powered by super-nuclear-reactors and what not. But right as 2140 passed, and now you are a human (would be be human or some Neuralink junkies by then, who knows!?) on January 1st 2142. You read in the news (obviously on Stacker News) an article explaining how the various powers/countries of the world decided to pursue bitcoin mining going forward. You also read about "The Families", generational 2012 bitcoin HODLer families and the antics of their progeny on the Page 3 and gossip sections of the the news. The governments need mining because by now they are all invested into bitcoin, but the politicians' personal wealth as well as entire national economies and all their citizens' wealth is in bitcoin. Also the moon and mars colonies long ago demanded to trade only in bitcoin, which was the only logical and possible way to trade AND mine bitcoin themselves. The delegates had put forth three broad suggestions:
- If there was only 1 govt./power/organization/union in the world
- If there was several but they were all friendly
- If there were several but they were unfriendly
I think number 3 will happen. But that's just conjecture. In case of:
- The elected (only High IQ productive people vote to elect the leader) govt. would only have to invest so much energy and chips that would be higher than what a single rogue individual or organization somewhere in the world can muster. No one else would need to mine but if someone wants to add to the network they will be allowed to, as long as they don't add too much hashrate.
- In this case also it would be similar, but the amount of energy+chips would be higher since now it could be an entire rogue country and it will take time to declare war on it and bring it under control. Each country will agree on a set percentage amount of hashrate it will invest in. As new technologies organically develop, they will be shared with all the other countries so that less effort needs to be put in maintaining the bitcoin standard. Things will keep getting exponentially easier and life will keep getting exponentially better every day.
- In this case, each country will be trying to develop energy and chip technology as fast as possible, afraid that the other superpower will gain 51% control and do a double spend. It will not be a dystopia in any sense of the world, but insane amounts of time, energy, talent, people, resources and bitcoins will be spent in trying to continually gain and edge over the other. Nations will again separate into collective vs individual input/output models (Communism vs. Capitalism), but since the main need of production is very specific now, the world will be flipped and Communism will easily triumph over Capitalistic societies. The nations putting collective effort into increasing their energy and mining infrastructure will be richer and offer more per capital distribution of rewards to their citizens than the "do as you will" countries. But still, a lot of the same good as in 2) will happen here too except there will be no sharing of technology and hackers will be the top paid job in the world earning today's equivalent of billions in salary per year.
I want the world in number 2) to happen but sadly, going by current trends, I think 3) will happen.
What do you think? Don't consider any of my body text, only the post subject/headline and think of scenarios on your own and please, discuss!