Bitcoin seems poised to go up, but I'm not confident in its long term future. Wall Street money seems to be having an effect on what's being implemented in the code base for bitcoin which wants it to be transparent and compliant with regulation. Censorship mining pools are forming to comply with FATF black lists.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/slippery-slope-as-new-bitcoin-mining-pool-censors-transactions
A comment on the below thread says Peter Todd was threatened by John Dillon to include RBF and insure that blocks stay at 1 MB. RBF (Replace by Fee) set up an auction environment so that startups couldn't compete due to rising transaction fees, and the same effect is magnified by the 1 MB limit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/chq1ao/roger_ver_on_the_replace_by_fee_drama/ (granted Roger Ver is not a neutral voice in this matter)
Privacy tech such as Schnorr sigs, taproot and tapscript is coming out too slowly to be a threat to chain analytics. Fungibility is becoming a serious issue as dirty coins are hard to move and freshly mined bitcoin goes for a premium.
The downside of Paypal becoming widely used is that the inability to do "proof of keys" means that price suppression is possible by not submitting to blockchain truth. There's no guarantee that the bitcoin you have in a centralized database is anything more than an IOU.
That said, I'm sure bitcoin is going to go up massively as Wall Street money is going to come in. But if @anonymint is correct about the segwit flaw eventually being exploited, everyone in bitcoin with segwit taint will eventually be fleeced.
I don't plan to hold it long term. I have been mainly doing intraday crypto trading and capitalizing on the erratic nature of both BTC and Doge. I have also been investing in blockchain tech companies, as their stocks are in the toilet now but won't be forever. Do you have any suggestions for cryptos to hold long term? Patrick likes ADA, but its market cap is already so high, I am not sure it has much room for growth.
If ADA reaches a market cap of 4 T, and the supply is at 40 B, that's a price per coin of 100 USD. By that time hyperinflation will have already hit. At best I don't see Cardano above $10 this year unless the USD collapses early (I think the first such collapse won't happen until Sept 2022). It's also a "promise coin" meaning that it hasn't proven itself much beyond white paper status. That said I do hold a small amount (about 1% of my portfolio).
Globalists seem intent on reducing population sooner rather than later and want to finalize their new technocratic grid. Patents like this one by Microsoft are popping up:
https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2020060606
If cyberpolygon.com plays out like event 201 did in late 2019, then you'll need an internet passport to match your vaccine passport to do anything on the internet. Programmers are working on a way to encode vaccine data residing below the skin from microneedle patches or vaccine enzymes to be picked up by signals hooked into IoT:
https://news.mit.edu/2019/storing-vaccine-history-skin-1218
There's already a more primitive way of doing this with diabetics sending the information to your smartphone which then gets transmitted to Google:
https://www.everydayhealth.com/type-2-diabetes/treatment/fda-approves-first-implantable-cgm-diabetics/
This will likely expand into all areas of health such as monitoring brain activity, with geolocation data.
Prediction markets will be formed to pick up "body activity data" from the Microsoft patent above, so that your owners can gamble on your movements and sell the cryptocurrency you've generated to other parties involved in trading you as a stock in their market.
How far this progresses depends upon how much the people submit to authority. They'll try to advance this agenda granularly to avoid raising suspicions, calling it a "conspiracy theory" when called out on it all while us programmers know the truth because we've been asked to program it.