Bitcoin’s Future Value Path Will Depend On Scaling and Halving Over the Next Century: Cobra

Bitcoin, the pioneer of the cryptocurrency space has become a formidable tool in the financial sector but with the surge of new altcoins with better functionality is challenging its status as the crypto king. The biggest threat to Bitcoin currently is the scalability issue, where the increased number of users have slowed the network down and the reluctance of developers to make changes in the original consensus is not helping either.

The first decade of Bitcoin was filled with ups and downs, given the technology was new and not many understood it, however, the hype around Bitcoin helped the crypto space to establish a name for itself and the developments in the next few years would determine the course for the next century.

Although it's hard to predict anything about the Bitcoin and crypto space in general, the Bitcoin.org co-owner Cobra says that the course of action in the next couple of years would play a pivotal role in determining the future.

Cobra's recent tweet read,

The next 3 or 4 years will determine whether Bitcoin will last and thrive for the next 100 years. The halving as well as hitting the limits of the current block sizes bringing scaling back to the forefront with more controversial hard/soft fork proposals. Will be turbulent times.

— CØ₿RA (@CobraBitcoin) April 30, 2019

Cobra Says Scaling And Halving Would Be Two Key Area Of Focus For The Bitcoin

Cobra while talking about Bitcoin and its internal protocol, the scaling, and the halving would be really crucial for the pioneer's future. Bitcoin is set for a third halving in 2020, by halving we mean block reward halving where the mining rewards get halved from the current 12.5 BTC, which will bring the block reward to 6.25 BTC per mined block.

Block Reward halving has been historically known to spike the prices of a particular token. The rise in prices can be observed anywhere from 3-months to 1 year prior to the scheduled halving. Apart from Cobra calling Bitcoin halving an important event for the token, a study done by CoinMetrics suggested that the prices of Bitcoin would reach its local peak 18 months after the halving apart from the pump leading up to the halving.

The study was based on the previous two halving cycles, and the peak price prediction is in line with what Cobra suggested.

Bitcoin Block Size Has Become A Dilemma

The debate over the block size of Bitcoin has been going around for quite some time, but it has intensified given the scalability issue that the network has been plagued with, which has led to slow transaction processing and increased transaction fee. The importance of block size can be understood from the fact that it has led to several hard-forks, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV being two prominent examples.

Many have proposed to increase the block size of Bitcoin to accommodate more transactions per block which would reduce the transaction time significantly, however the developer community behind the Bitcoin network seems to be reluctant to make any fundamental changes to the original protocol created by Satoshi.

Earlier this year Luke Dashjr proposed to reduce the block size in order to reduce the per block mining time, however, Cobra was quick to hit back calling such forks

“contentious.”

Cobra says such solutions would only lead to a massive outage as it is not practical and creates more problem than it solves. He explained,

“This will split off from the established consensus, cause massive drama, and damage trust in Bitcoin.”