• First Principles
  • 1. Scarcity is real
• 2. Bitcoin’s biggest advantage is not technology
• 3. Bitcoin L1 cannot become the world’s retail payment network
• 4. The base layer will change slowly
• 5. Bitcoin’s biggest unsolved problem is the security budget
• 6. Mining is an energy business
• 7. Self-custody will not remain seed-phrase-centric
• 8. Stablecoins are not Bitcoin’s enemy
• 9. Institutions do not eliminate Bitcoin’s usefulness
• 10. Price matters, but adoption matters more
• End of 2026
  • Base Case
    • Bitcoin L1
    • Lightning
    • Spark
    • Ark
    • Mining
    • My takeaway
• 2027
  • Theme: Wallet Abstraction
    • Wallets
    • Payments
    • Stablecoins
    • Institutions
    • Mining
• 2028
  • Theme: The Fifth Halving
    • Mining
    • Fee Market
    • Bitcoin L2s
    • Protocol
• 2029
  • Theme: Bitcoin Becomes Collateral
    • Bitcoin-backed credit
    • Mortgages
    • Corporate treasury
    • Governments
• 2030
  • Theme: Bitcoin Becomes Boring
    • Volatility
    • Payments
• 2031
  • Theme: Machine Money
    • Agent payments
    • Nostr
• 2032
  • Theme: The Sixth Halving
    • Fees
    • Base-layer settlement
    • Covenants
    • Mining
• 2033
  • Theme: Scaling Becomes Invisible
    • Wallet architecture
    • Self-custody
    • Custody spectrum
• 2034
  • Theme: Bitcoin Enters Sovereign Finance
    • Central banks
    • Sovereign wealth funds
    • U.S. / Europe
• 2035
  • Theme: The Security Budget Test Approaches
    • My expected result
    • Fee pressure
• 2036
• Bitcoin at Twenty-Seven Years Old
  • Theme: Global Digital Collateral
  • Monetary Role
• Supply
• Mining
• Bitcoin L1
• Transactions
• Lightning
• Ark
• Spark
• Stablecoins
• Banks
• Bitcoin-Backed Credit
• Governments
• Privacy
• Quantum Computing
• AI
• Nostr and Open Protocols
• What I Do NOT Expect by 2036
  • I don’t expect the dollar to disappear.
  • I don’t expect Bitcoin to become the universal unit of account.
  • I don’t expect every person to hold Bitcoin on-chain.
  • I don’t expect Lightning to handle everything.
  • I don’t expect banks to disappear.
  • I don’t expect governments to ban Bitcoin successfully.
  • I don’t expect Bitcoin to remain completely unchanged.
  • I don’t expect smooth price appreciation.
• My Rough 2036 Scorecard
• Probability of Specific Predictions
• The Most Important Thing I Expect to Change
• The Most Important Thing I Expect NOT to Change
• Final Prediction
  • 2026–2028
  • 2029–2031
  • 2032–2034
  • 2035–2036

My base case is that Bitcoin survives the next decade and becomes substantially more important, but probably not in the simplistic way either its strongest advocates or strongest critics imagine.

I do not expect Bitcoin to replace the dollar, destroy central banking, make every other financial asset obsolete, or become the transaction network on which everyone directly buys coffee.

I also do not expect it to disappear, be regulated out of existence, suffer a fatal mining collapse, or be displaced by a technologically superior cryptocurrency.

Instead, I expect Bitcoin to evolve into something more mundane and potentially more important:

A politically neutral global reserve asset and settlement network underneath a growing ecosystem of financial systems.

Most people using Bitcoin-related infrastructure in 2036 may rarely make an on-chain Bitcoin transaction.

They may use:

• Bitcoin-backed savings accounts

• Lightning

• Spark-like systems

• Ark-like systems

• stablecoins

• bank accounts backed partly by Bitcoin

• Bitcoin collateral

• payment apps

• AI agents

• institutional custody

• multisignature vaults

while Bitcoin itself sits underneath these systems as scarce settlement collateral.

The base layer will probably remain surprisingly similar to the Bitcoin of 2026.

The ecosystem above it will not.

My rough probability distribution for Bitcoin’s state in 2036 is:

The most likely outcome is therefore neither hyperbitcoinization nor failure.

It is institutionalization + financialization + gradual technical layering.

§First Principles

Before predicting individual years, it helps to establish what actually constrains Bitcoin.

§1. Scarcity is real

Bitcoin’s supply schedule is not merely marketing.

It is enforced independently by thousands of nodes.

Changing the 21 million limit would require convincing economically relevant participants to accept different monetary rules.

That is extraordinarily difficult.

The important consequence is not that Bitcoin’s price must rise forever.

It is that demand shocks cannot generate additional supply.

When demand for gold increases, additional mining eventually responds.

When demand for housing increases, construction eventually responds.

When demand for equities increases, companies can issue additional shares.

Bitcoin cannot meaningfully respond this way.

Its supply curve is close to vertical.

That makes Bitcoin unusually sensitive to changes in demand.

§2. Bitcoin’s biggest advantage is not technology

This is an important distinction.

Bitcoin is not the fastest blockchain.

It is not the most programmable blockchain.

It does not have the highest transaction throughput.

Its scripting language is intentionally restrictive.

Its greatest advantage is something much harder to reproduce:

credibility.

Bitcoin has accumulated:

• monetary credibility

• enormous proof-of-work security

• liquidity

• infrastructure

• brand recognition

• regulatory familiarity

• institutional ownership

• distributed ownership

• political constituencies

• developer conservatism

• a seventeen-year operating history

A competing cryptocurrency can reproduce Bitcoin’s code.

It cannot reproduce Bitcoin’s history.

That creates an enormous Lindy effect.

Every additional year Bitcoin survives makes a sudden disappearance less likely.

§3. Bitcoin L1 cannot become the world’s retail payment network

This is simply arithmetic.

Bitcoin processes only a few thousand ordinary transactions per block.

There are roughly 144 blocks per day.

Even enormous engineering improvements do not change the fundamental fact that billions of people cannot routinely transact directly on Bitcoin L1.

Therefore one of two things must eventually be true:

1. Bitcoin never becomes widely used.

or

2. Most Bitcoin activity happens above the base layer.

If Bitcoin succeeds, the second outcome is almost unavoidable.

That means the future of Bitcoin is inherently layered.

§4. The base layer will change slowly

Bitcoin has an unusual governance structure.

There is no CEO.

There is no foundation with unilateral authority.

Developers cannot force miners to upgrade.

Miners cannot force users to accept new consensus rules.

Node operators cannot easily force exchanges to adopt changes.

Major consensus upgrades therefore require unusually broad agreement.

This creates frustratingly slow development.

But it also creates monetary credibility.

If Bitcoin changed as quickly as Ethereum, it would arguably be less attractive as a reserve asset.

Therefore I expect:

Bitcoin L1 in 2036 to look surprisingly similar to Bitcoin L1 in 2026.

Most experimentation will migrate upward.

§5. Bitcoin’s biggest unsolved problem is the security budget

Today’s miners earn two things:

block subsidy + transaction fees

The subsidy falls every four years.

2026:

3.125 BTC

2028:

1.5625 BTC

2032:

0.78125 BTC

2036:

0.390625 BTC

Transaction fees therefore have to become increasingly important.

Today they remain small relative to the subsidy during normal periods. In early August 2026, miners were averaging only roughly 0.02–0.025 BTC of transaction fees per block, versus a 3.125 BTC subsidy.

That gap is enormous.

Bitcoin has another decade before this becomes existential, but this will increasingly become the central economic question surrounding Bitcoin.

§6. Mining is an energy business

Mining ultimately turns:

electricity → hashes → Bitcoin

ASIC technology will continue improving, but semiconductor efficiency gains cannot continue exponentially forever.

That means miners increasingly compete on electricity.

The natural destination is energy that is:

• extremely cheap

• intermittent

• stranded

• curtailed

• remote

• difficult to monetize otherwise

Bitcoin mining therefore increasingly becomes part of energy infrastructure rather than merely a collection of data centers.

§7. Self-custody will not remain seed-phrase-centric

Twelve or twenty-four words written on paper is an ingenious recovery mechanism.

It is also terrible consumer UX.

Mass adoption cannot realistically depend on billions of humans successfully protecting static secrets for decades.

The eventual consumer model is more likely to combine:

• hardware-backed keys

• passkeys

• multiple devices

• multisig

• timelocks

• social recovery

• cloud-encrypted recovery

• inheritance policies

• hardware wallets

• specialized custodians

The important distinction will increasingly become:

Does the user retain ultimate control?

rather than:

Does the user personally memorize or store a seed phrase?

§8. Stablecoins are not Bitcoin’s enemy

This is another area where ideological predictions often fail.

People frequently want two different things:

a long-term savings asset

and

a stable medium of exchange

Bitcoin may excel at the first while dollars remain superior for the second.

Bitcoin infrastructure can support both.

Spark already supports Bitcoin-native stablecoin infrastructure and Lightning interoperability, while multiple Bitcoin-adjacent systems are experimenting with dollar-denominated assets.

I expect stablecoins and Bitcoin increasingly to become complementary.

§9. Institutions do not eliminate Bitcoin’s usefulness

A common criticism says institutional adoption defeats the purpose of Bitcoin.

I think this misunderstands the network.

Bitcoin allows self-custody.

It does not require it.

An ecosystem can simultaneously contain:

• sovereign individuals

• family offices

• ETFs

• banks

• governments

• corporations

• custodians

The option to withdraw Bitcoin and hold it independently keeps the custodial layers anchored to something outside themselves.

That is fundamentally different from a financial system where every asset exists only as an entry in someone else’s database.

§10. Price matters, but adoption matters more

I will include rough price ranges for each year because price influences mining, adoption and collateralization.

But precise Bitcoin price forecasts ten years out are mostly theater.

Instead of predicting exact prices, I use broad ranges representing what I think would be plausible under the scenario described.

All figures are nominal U.S. dollars.

§End of 2026

§Base Case

BTC: $75K–$100K

Bitcoin finishes 2026 recovering from the major 2025–26 drawdown but probably below the 2025 all-time high.

The significance of 2026 will ultimately be less about price than about infrastructure.

§Bitcoin L1

The BIP-110 episode reinforces how resistant Bitcoin consensus is to unilateral change.

Bitcoin Core remains dominant.

Consensus-change discussions continue around:

• covenants

• quantum resistance

• transaction introspection

• improved vault constructions

But nothing dramatic activates.

§Lightning

Lightning remains the dominant decentralized Bitcoin payment network.

The emphasis shifts from proving Lightning works toward improving:

• liquidity

• offline receiving

• BOLT12

• channel factories

• privacy

• wallet UX

LND 0.21 already brought production-ready simple Taproot channels and onion messaging, both laying groundwork for more capable Lightning infrastructure.

§Spark

Spark becomes one of the year’s most important Bitcoin infrastructure developments.

Its main appeal is obvious:

Lightning-compatible payments without exposing normal users to channel management.

The fact that its SDK can combine BTC, Lightning interoperability and stablecoins points toward where wallets are likely heading.

§Ark

Ark remains considerably smaller but gains credibility.

The interesting question shifts from:

“Does Ark work?”

to:

“What Bitcoin changes would make Ark dramatically better?”

That strengthens the covenant discussion.

§Mining

Hash rate remains around the general zettahash region.

Mining economics remain brutal.

The industry consolidates further around:

• efficient ASICs

• cheap power

• sophisticated treasury management

• energy partnerships

§My takeaway

2026 marks the beginning of Bitcoin’s transition from:

Bitcoin + Lightning

toward:

Bitcoin + an ecosystem of interoperable higher layers.

§2027

§Theme: Wallet Abstraction

BTC: $80K–$140K

The most noticeable technical development is not a protocol upgrade.

It is wallets getting better.

Users increasingly stop thinking about:

• on-chain balance

• Lightning balance

• Spark balance

as separate concepts.

Wallets begin presenting something closer to:

Bitcoin balance: 0.042 BTC

and deciding behind the scenes how payments should move.

§Wallets

Passkey-backed wallet recovery becomes much more common.

Sophisticated self-custody increasingly uses combinations of:

• device keys

• encrypted cloud shares

• hardware signing

• recovery keys

instead of one seed phrase.

§Payments

Payment routing becomes increasingly abstract.

A wallet might automatically decide:

Small payment
↓
Lightning

Offline recipient
↓
Spark-like layer

Large settlement
↓
Bitcoin L1

Users care less about which protocol handled the transaction.

§Stablecoins

Bitcoin wallets increasingly include stablecoin balances.

This sounds heretical to Bitcoin purists, but it is economically logical.

A user might save:

BTC

while spending:

USD stablecoins

through the same wallet.

§Institutions

Bitcoin becomes increasingly normal in traditional investment portfolios.

ETF inflows stop being newsworthy.

They become infrastructure.

§Mining

AI data centers and Bitcoin miners increasingly compete for the same electricity.

Bitcoin miners respond by specializing in flexible loads that can shut down when electricity becomes valuable elsewhere.

Mining increasingly becomes grid arbitrage.

§2028

§Theme: The Fifth Halving

BTC: $110K–$200K

Bitcoin undergoes its fifth halving.

Block subsidy falls:

3.125 → 1.5625 BTC

This creates another major stress test for mining economics.

§Mining

Some miners fail.

Others consolidate.

Hash rate may temporarily decline.

The important development is that mining economics become increasingly tied to energy strategy, not merely ASIC ownership.

The most competitive miners increasingly operate where power is:

• stranded

• curtailed

• seasonal

• interruptible

§Fee Market

Discussion about Bitcoin’s long-term security budget becomes noticeably louder.

Fees still do not replace the subsidy.

But the issue begins migrating from theoretical developer discussion into mainstream Bitcoin economics.

§Bitcoin L2s

Lightning remains important, but I doubt it monopolizes Bitcoin payments.

Instead:

• Lightning specializes in routing

• Spark-like systems specialize in easy wallet UX

• Ark-like systems specialize in shared UTXO scalability

• federations handle some community use cases

• Liquid continues institutional niches

§Protocol

A limited covenant proposal gets significantly closer to consensus.

I would put roughly a 50% probability on some covenant-like functionality being activated between 2028 and 2032.

Not because Bitcoin developers suddenly become adventurous.

Because scaling pressure slowly makes the benefits harder to ignore.

§2029

§Theme: Bitcoin Becomes Collateral

BTC: $150K–$275K

This is the year I expect Bitcoin’s financial role to start becoming more important than the “number go up” narrative.

§Bitcoin-backed credit

Bitcoin-backed loans become common enough to resemble an ordinary financial product.

Banks increasingly understand how to underwrite Bitcoin collateral.

The interesting financial property is that Bitcoin is:

• liquid

• globally priced

• continuously traded

• instantly verifiable

• difficult to counterfeit

That makes it unusually convenient collateral.

§Mortgages

Bitcoin-backed or Bitcoin-assisted mortgages expand.

Most do not require borrowers to finance an entire house using Bitcoin collateral.

Hybrid structures emerge:

House
+
income / cash flow
+
Bitcoin collateral
=
mortgage underwriting

This starts making Bitcoin wealth useful without requiring liquidation.

§Corporate treasury

Holding a small Bitcoin allocation becomes less controversial for corporations.

But I do not expect every company to transform itself into a leveraged Bitcoin treasury vehicle.

That model works only under specific capital-market conditions.

§Governments

Several smaller governments hold Bitcoin reserves.

Major powers mostly treat Bitcoin as a reserve diversification asset rather than replacing their currencies with it.

§2030

§Theme: Bitcoin Becomes Boring

BTC: $175K–$325K

This may be one of Bitcoin’s most important milestones.

Bitcoin stops feeling novel.

A teenager born in 2015 has never experienced a world where Bitcoin didn’t exist.

Financial professionals entering the workforce have grown up with it.

§Volatility

Bitcoin remains volatile, but its volatility continues declining.

I would expect annualized volatility to be materially lower than during the 2017–2021 era.

This has an interesting consequence.

Lower volatility makes Bitcoin:

• less exciting to speculators

but:

• more useful as collateral

• easier for institutions to own

• easier to borrow against

• more credible as reserves

§Payments

Some global payment apps quietly use Bitcoin infrastructure.

Users often don’t know.

The product experience might simply be:

Send $12.50 to Maria.

Underneath:

USD stablecoin
→ Bitcoin-oriented payment layer
→ recipient

or:

BTC
→ Lightning
→ automatic FX
→ pesos

Bitcoin starts disappearing beneath the interface.

That is a sign of success.

§2031

§Theme: Machine Money

BTC: $225K–$400K

AI agents increasingly become economic actors.

This creates a payments problem.

Machines need to make:

• tiny payments

• cross-border payments

• API payments

• autonomous payments

Credit cards are awkward for this.

Bank accounts are worse.

Bitcoin-oriented payment infrastructure is unusually well suited.

§Agent payments

HTTP APIs increasingly support something analogous to:

request
→ payment challenge
→ Lightning / BTC payment
→ response

Machine-to-machine payments become a meaningful niche.

Not everything uses Bitcoin.

Stablecoins compete heavily.

But Bitcoin infrastructure becomes one of the standard payment rails available to autonomous software.

§Nostr

Bitcoin + Nostr-type protocols find a durable niche among decentralized applications and autonomous agents.

I don’t expect Nostr to replace every social platform.

I do expect the concept of:

portable cryptographic identity + permissionless payments

to become increasingly important.

§2032

§Theme: The Sixth Halving

BTC: $275K–$500K

Block subsidy becomes:

0.78125 BTC

At this point Bitcoin’s security-budget debate becomes impossible to ignore.

§Fees

Fees represent a meaningfully larger percentage of miner income during active periods.

Bitcoin L1 is increasingly treated as premium block space.

Routine retail transactions become economically irrational on-chain.

That isn’t necessarily failure.

It resembles using Fedwire to buy coffee.

§Base-layer settlement

The typical L1 transaction increasingly represents something larger:

• exchange settlement

• institutional transfer

• L2 opening/closing

• batched wallet activity

• large private transfers

• collateral movement

§Covenants

My base case is that Bitcoin has adopted at least one conservative covenant mechanism by this point.

If so, we see major improvements in:

• vaults

• Ark

• channel factories

• congestion control

• shared UTXO constructions

Bitcoin does not suddenly become Ethereum.

The upgrade is deliberately constrained.

§Mining

The industry is dominated by operators with sophisticated energy strategies.

Mining becomes deeply integrated with power generation.

§2033

§Theme: Scaling Becomes Invisible

BTC: $300K–$550K

By now, arguing about which Bitcoin L2 “won” sounds increasingly outdated.

Several survive.

Wallets route between them.

§Wallet architecture

A sophisticated wallet might contain:

BTC savings vault
      ↓
Bitcoin L1

spending balance
      ↓
Spark / Ark / Lightning

dollar balance
      ↓
stablecoin

merchant payment
      ↓
best available route

The user does not manually select networks.

§Self-custody

Traditional seed phrases still exist.

Power users still use them.

But mainstream self-custody looks more like modern account security:

• passkey

• hardware enclave

• secondary device

• timelocked recovery

• optional family/recovery keys

Losing a phone no longer means panicking about a piece of paper hidden ten years ago.

§Custody spectrum

People understand that Bitcoin custody is not binary.

There is a spectrum:

ETF
↓
exchange
↓
collaborative custody
↓
multisig
↓
hardware wallet
↓
fully independent cold storage

Different users choose different tradeoffs.

§2034

§Theme: Bitcoin Enters Sovereign Finance

BTC: $350K–$650K

I expect this to happen gradually rather than through a dramatic “nation-state adoption” moment.

§Central banks

A minority of central banks hold Bitcoin.

Usually small allocations.

Something like:

0.5–3% of reserves

rather than 50%.

The motivation is diversification.

Bitcoin has several characteristics central banks normally value:

• global liquidity

• no foreign issuer

• finite supply

• portability

• neutral settlement

The objection is volatility.

As volatility falls, the reserve argument becomes stronger.

§Sovereign wealth funds

Sovereign wealth funds are more aggressive than central banks.

Bitcoin becomes comparable to a small alternative-asset allocation.

§U.S. / Europe

Western governments do not abandon fiat currencies.

Bitcoin coexists with them.

States continue taxing in fiat.

Government debt continues being denominated in fiat.

Bitcoin becomes another reserve asset, not the sovereign unit of account.

§2035

§Theme: The Security Budget Test Approaches

BTC: $400K–$750K

Attention increasingly turns toward the 2036 halving.

The subsidy is already relatively small.

Bitcoin must demonstrate that the combination of:

BTC price × block subsidy + fees

continues providing sufficient security.

§My expected result

It probably does.

The important point is that miner security depends on dollar revenue, not BTC subsidy alone.

For example:

0.4 BTC × $600,000 BTC
=
$240,000 per block

before fees.

A much smaller Bitcoin subsidy can therefore finance enormous mining expenditure if Bitcoin itself becomes sufficiently valuable.

This is why claims that halvings automatically destroy Bitcoin security are too simplistic.

The actual equation is:

miner revenue
=
BTC subsidy × BTC price
+
transaction fees

§Fee pressure

Nevertheless, the fee market becomes more important.

Periods of high settlement demand generate extremely expensive blocks.

Users increasingly tolerate this because normal activity takes place elsewhere.

§2036

§Bitcoin at Twenty-Seven Years Old

§Theme: Global Digital Collateral

BTC base-case range: $500K–$1M

I would assign only moderate confidence to this range.

Ten-year nominal asset-price forecasting is inherently unreliable.

But the underlying network state is much easier to reason about.

My base case for Bitcoin in 2036 looks something like this:

§Monetary Role

Bitcoin is broadly regarded as:

digital reserve collateral

rather than primarily “cryptocurrency.”

It sits alongside assets such as:

• gold

• sovereign bonds

• major currencies

but behaves differently from all of them.

Its primary attraction remains:

nobody can manufacture more of it.

§Supply

Approximately 20.8 million BTC have been mined.

The remaining supply issuance is economically insignificant compared with the existing stock.

Lost coins make the effective circulating supply lower.

New Bitcoin supply barely matters.

Nearly all price discovery therefore occurs between existing holders and new buyers.

§Mining

The 2036 halving reduces the subsidy to:

0.390625 BTC

Mining remains enormously competitive.

I expect hash rate to be several multiples higher than 2026, although raw hash rate becomes a poor comparison because ASIC efficiency has improved dramatically.

Mining clusters around:

• hydroelectric power

• nuclear

• geothermal

• curtailed renewable power

• natural-gas mitigation

• flexible grid demand

• remote energy resources

Mining is increasingly considered a specialized energy-industry business.

§Bitcoin L1

Bitcoin L1 remains recognizable.

Blocks are still produced roughly every ten minutes.

The 21 million supply remains intact.

Bitcoin Script is somewhat more capable but still intentionally constrained.

There have probably been only a handful of meaningful consensus changes during the entire decade.

That conservatism is increasingly regarded as Bitcoin’s defining feature.

§Transactions

Average individuals rarely transact directly on L1.

On-chain Bitcoin is primarily used for:

• large settlement

• custody restructuring

• institutional transfers

• L2 settlement

• large purchases

• vault movements

• collateral movements

A single Bitcoin transaction may represent thousands of underlying payments occurring on higher layers.

§Lightning

Lightning survives.

I do not expect Lightning to fail.

I also do not expect Lightning to become the only Bitcoin L2.

Its role evolves toward:

• universal payment interoperability

• routing

• machine payments

• merchant settlement

• cross-network liquidity

Many users indirectly use Lightning without operating traditional channels themselves.

§Ark

Ark or an Ark-derived protocol becomes a meaningful component of self-custodial scaling.

Its strongest use case is shared UTXOs.

Rather than giving every person their own Bitcoin UTXO, many users share on-chain structures while retaining enforceable ownership rights.

This becomes increasingly important because block space is scarce.

§Spark

Spark itself may or may not dominate in 2036.

Predicting a particular startup or implementation ten years out would be reckless.

But I think the architecture Spark represents is highly likely to survive:

self-custodial off-chain Bitcoin with excellent UX and Lightning interoperability.

Today’s Spark already demonstrates the appeal: no normal channel management, offline receiving, SDK-level integration, and native support for Bitcoin and stablecoins.

Whether Spark wins or something improves upon it is much harder to predict.

§Stablecoins

Stablecoins are enormous.

Probably trillions of dollars circulate in tokenized fiat.

Bitcoin infrastructure captures part of this market.

This does not undermine Bitcoin.

It produces a monetary stack something like:

Long-term savings
        ↓
       BTC

Short-term spending
        ↓
     dollars

Settlement infrastructure
        ↓
Bitcoin + Bitcoin L2s

People can prefer Bitcoin as savings and dollars as a unit of account simultaneously.

§Banks

Major banks provide:

• Bitcoin custody

• Bitcoin-backed loans

• Bitcoin payments

• Bitcoin trading

• multisig services

The debate over whether banks will “adopt Bitcoin” feels obsolete.

They do.

The more interesting question is how much Bitcoin activity happens outside them.

§Bitcoin-Backed Credit

Bitcoin becomes one of the world’s most convenient forms of financial collateral.

A wealthy individual with Bitcoin does not necessarily sell it to buy:

• a house

• a business

• land

• investments

Instead, Bitcoin-backed credit markets provide liquidity.

This creates risks.

Leverage causes periodic liquidations.

Bitcoin credit crises occasionally amplify market crashes.

But the collateral market survives them.

§Governments

Several nations hold Bitcoin reserves.

A few governments accumulate meaningful positions.

Most hold none or relatively little.

Bitcoin does not abolish nation-state currencies.

Instead, states grudgingly accept that Bitcoin is another reserve asset they cannot control.

§Privacy

This is one area where I am less optimistic.

Blockchain surveillance becomes extraordinarily sophisticated.

AI dramatically improves transaction clustering.

Simple on-chain Bitcoin usage offers little privacy.

But wallet technology improves simultaneously through:

• Silent Payments

• Payjoin

• Coinjoins or their successors

• private blockchain querying

• Lightning

• ecash

• off-chain protocols

Privacy therefore becomes increasingly dependent on wallet architecture rather than the base blockchain itself.

§Quantum Computing

I do not expect quantum computers to break Bitcoin by 2036.

I do expect Bitcoin to have a clear migration strategy.

Bitcoin developers are already actively discussing post-quantum output types, witness commitments and recovery mechanisms in 2026.

By 2036, quantum-safe addresses may exist.

Old exposed public keys become increasingly discouraged.

Moving coins to quantum-resistant outputs eventually becomes standard advice.

§AI

AI has surprisingly significant implications for Bitcoin.

AI radically lowers the cost of:

• wallet development

• infrastructure management

• node administration

• financial automation

• security monitoring

But the bigger change is economic.

Autonomous agents require money.

Bitcoin and stablecoin payment rails offer something traditional banking infrastructure fundamentally struggles to provide:

permissionless accounts for software.

By 2036, machine-to-machine payments are a meaningful part of the Bitcoin payment ecosystem.

§Nostr and Open Protocols

I doubt Nostr replaces today’s giant social networks.

But I think cryptographic identity protocols become considerably more important.

The combination:

cryptographic identity
+
open communication
+
native payments

is powerful.

Bitcoin increasingly serves as the money layer beneath open internet protocols.

§What I Do NOT Expect by 2036

Several popular Bitcoin predictions strike me as unlikely.

§I don’t expect the dollar to disappear.

Governments have enormous incentives to preserve sovereign currencies.

§I don’t expect Bitcoin to become the universal unit of account.

People will probably still think in:

• dollars

• euros

• yuan

• yen

Bitcoin may become a reserve asset before becoming a widespread unit of account.

§I don’t expect every person to hold Bitcoin on-chain.

There isn’t enough block space.

§I don’t expect Lightning to handle everything.

Different scaling systems optimize different tradeoffs.

§I don’t expect banks to disappear.

Bitcoin changes what banks can control.

It doesn’t eliminate demand for:

• credit

• custody

• risk management

• maturity transformation

• financial services

§I don’t expect governments to ban Bitcoin successfully.

Some governments will restrict it.

But a globally distributed digital asset with enormous economic constituencies is extremely difficult to eradicate.

§I don’t expect Bitcoin to remain completely unchanged.

Protocol ossification will increase.

But serious problems will eventually justify carefully designed upgrades.

§I don’t expect smooth price appreciation.

Even if Bitcoin eventually reaches $500K–$1M, I would expect multiple:

30–50% crashes

along the way.

Possibly another decline exceeding 60%.

Bitcoin becoming larger does not eliminate leverage, panic or macroeconomic shocks.

§My Rough 2036 Scorecard

§Probability of Specific Predictions

To make this forecast falsifiable:

§The Most Important Thing I Expect to Change

The common mental model today is:

Bitcoin is an asset you buy.

I think that description will increasingly become incomplete.

The 2036 mental model is more likely:

Bitcoin is an asset, settlement network and collateral layer underneath financial infrastructure.

That distinction matters.

The internet did not win because everyone learned TCP/IP.

It won because applications used TCP/IP invisibly.

Bitcoin probably follows a similar path.

People will not necessarily say:

“I’m using a Bitcoin Layer 2 transaction.”

They will say:

“I sent you the money.”

Their wallet will decide what happens underneath.

§The Most Important Thing I Expect NOT to Change

Bitcoin itself.

That may sound strange after describing enormous change.

But the fundamental Bitcoin system probably remains remarkably familiar:

21 million BTC

Proof of Work

~10-minute blocks

UTXOs

private keys

full nodes

miners

a public blockchain

permissionless validation

The base layer becomes boring infrastructure.

And boring infrastructure is often what successful infrastructure eventually looks like.

§Final Prediction

If I had to compress the entire next decade into one forecast, it would be this:

§2026–2028

Bitcoin recovers, scaling architectures compete, wallets improve, institutions continue accumulating.

§2029–2031

Bitcoin becomes increasingly useful as collateral, higher-layer payments disappear behind consumer interfaces, and machines become meaningful Bitcoin users.

§2032–2034

The declining block subsidy makes settlement fees and L2 scaling much more important. Bitcoin begins appearing more seriously in sovereign finance.

§2035–2036

Bitcoin emerges as established global reserve collateral rather than a speculative technological experiment.

The most likely Bitcoin of 2036 is therefore neither the maximalist fantasy nor the skeptic’s failure scenario.

It is something more practical:

A $10–20+ trillion neutral monetary asset underneath a diverse ecosystem of banks, wallets, payment networks, stablecoins, autonomous software and self-custodial financial systems.

Bitcoin does not replace the entire financial system.

It becomes one of the foundations the financial system has to build around.