The end of BITCOIN

Reason NO.1
When Bitcoin was launched, everyone was excited about the almost negligible transaction costs. Sending money across the globe was almost free of charge and was almost instantaneously, creating a completely new world and bypassing the banks if it came to transferring money across the globe. However, things have changed. On August 25, 2017, the average transaction fee reached its highest level of $ 8,936 per transaction.
The cause for the high transaction fees lies in the fact that the sizes of the blocks are currently limited to 1MB per block and almost each block is completely filled. The average block size on September 8, 2017, was 993KB, which means that every block is filled up with transactions. Bitcoin was created in such a way that miners that validate transactions have to use a tremendous amount of computing power, equals energy, and if there is an increasing demand for transactions to be validated, miners will prioritise transactions that pay a higher fee. It is economics 1.1, stating that if the demand increases, but supply remains the same (number of transactions that can be validated per block), the price increases.

Another reason for the increased transaction fee is the newly created cryptocurrency Bitcoin Cash that split off from Bitcoin on August 1. Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are very similar cryptocurrencies, which means that miners can easily switch from Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash, if it becomes more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash (the rationale behind this has to do with how the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash protocols have been developed; if there are fewer miners, the mining difficulty goes down, making it easier to mine and hence the possibility to make more money increases.

Reason No.2
Scalability is a major issue for Bitcoin. The Bitcoin blockchain is by now 130 Gigabyte and is growing steadily with 1 MB per block, every ten minutes. The idea of Blockchain is that every node in the distributed web has a complete copy of the blockchain. So, if you wish to start validating transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, you first have to download the entire blockchain. If the size of the blocks would increase, that would have an enormous effect on the size of the Bitcoin Blockchain, which would make it more expensive to validate transactions (since significantly more storage is required). Blocks of 2MB size would result in an increase in the Bitcoin Blockchain of, approximately, 288 MB per day, which equals 105 GB per year (the size of the Bitcoin Cash Blockchain is already at 150GB (as per September 8, 2017), since it uses block sizes up to 8 MB since August 1, 2017). Of course, even larger block sizes would dramatically increase this.

Reason No.3
Finally, Bitcoin is an incredibly unsustainable coin in terms of its energy consumption. The Proof of Work consensus mechanism requires tremendous amounts of computing power. According to VICE, in 2015 a single Bitcoin transaction used roughly enough electricity to power 1.57 American households for a day. This results in an estimated annual energy consumption of approximately 16 terawatt hours.

CERN uses approximately 1.3 terawatt-hours per year to power the Large Hadron Collider. In fact, that is as much energy as the annual energy consumption of Iceland and it is almost 30.000 times the energy consumption of VISA (which happens to process 82.3 billion transactions in 2016, compared to the approximately 100 million Bitcoin transactions in the past year). With the increase in block size to be expected, this would increase even more. In addition, since most of the mining pools are in China, the majority of this energy consumption is driven by unsustainable coal-powered energy plants. Although of course, it is possible that miners may switch to clean energy, we still have the problem that the mining of Bitcoin is literally a waste of energy, because the complex computer calculations as part of the Proof of Work consensus protocol have no value at all. No world problems are being solved by the calculations, except to show that the calculation has been done. Unless Bitcoin would switch to a different consensus protocol, it may be clear that the energy consumption of Bitcoin is rapidly becoming very unsustainable.

Conclusion:
The future of cryptocurrencies is wide open and in the coming years, we will see plenty of new cryptocurrencies coming and going. We will see governments developing their own crypto Dollar/Euro/Pound/Yuan/Dirham, potentially even completely replacing cash. Any non-government future cryptocurrency that aims to become accepted and used by the general public should adhere to the five criteria set out here, which is why in the coming years we will see the inevitable fall of Bitcoin.

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