The future of Bitcoin: de-dollarisation, CBDCs and mass adoption

Bitcoin turned fifteen not long ago, and in that short span it has travelled from a curiosity swapped between a handful of cypherpunks to an asset that presidential candidates court on stage and that public companies hold on their balance sheets. When people ask me about the future of Bitcoin, they almost always mean one thing: the price. That is the least useful question I can answer, and the one I am most likely to get wrong.

So this guide takes a different route. Instead of guessing a number, it looks at the forces that actually shape where Bitcoin goes next: the slow drift away from the US dollar, the state's own experiments with digital money, and the unglamorous human problems that still sit between Bitcoin and its next billion users. None of this is financial advice, and you will not find a price target anywhere below.

Why are Bitcoin price predictions a distraction?

Because a price forecast is a coin toss dressed up as analysis. The odds of being wrong comfortably outweigh the odds of being right, and a confident figure tells you almost nothing you can act on. I would rather read the ecosystem and the politics around it, which move slowly enough that you can actually reason about them.

Open X, or almost any bank's research note, and the future of Bitcoin arrives as a number with a currency sign in front of it. I have never made those calls and I am not about to start. Pushed for one at a conference, I tend to say that price predictions are like belly buttons: everyone has one, and nobody else needs to see yours.

What is worth doing is watching the ecosystem, because human systems leave tracks. Day to day, progress in Bitcoin feels glacial and often disappointing. Zoom out to five, ten or fifteen years and the change is hard to believe. Bill Gates put the general point well: "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years." That is the lens I use here, though any specific guess about 2040 will surely age badly.

Could Bitcoin become a global reserve asset as the dollar weakens?

Possibly, one day, but not yet. The dollar is losing reserve share slowly, not collapsing, and Bitcoin is not deep or mature enough to take its place today. De-dollarisation is real, but it is diversification at the margins rather than a handover, and Bitcoin is only one candidate among several.

The dollar has been the world's reserve asset and its default unit of trade since the post-war Bretton Woods settlement. Oil, gas and most other commodities have been priced in dollars for the best part of a century, which is where the term "petrodollar" comes from, and which forces other countries to hold dollars before they can buy the energy a modern economy runs on. China still pays for oil in dollars. Russia, however much it resents it, still sells its oil in dollars: the 2022 sanctions carved out specific banks so the global energy trade would not seize up. (For how the dollar won that role, see what is money.)

The frustration is real, and so is the slow drift away. The IMF's own data puts the dollar's share of allocated reserves at roughly 57% in 2025, down from more than 70% two decades earlier, with the Chinese renminbi picking up perhaps a quarter of the slack (Dollar Dominance in the International Reserve System). But a gentle decline is not a collapse: the dollar is deeply entrenched, there is still no obvious replacement, and every rival carries its own baggage.

The United States has not helped its own case, and has been accused of weaponising its position: FATCA compels banks worldwide to report their customers to Washington, and recent years have seen hundreds of billions in Russian state assets frozen and Russian banks cut out of the SWIFT network. There are no clean hands here. Plenty of countries have good reason to want out of the dollar system; the trouble is that the alternatives keep making themselves less appealing. Bitcoiners argue that a neutral, stateless asset is the only real answer, and in principle they may be right, but the network is not ready to carry that weight today. The steady arrival of institutions, covered in Bitcoin institutional adoption, matters more here than any forecast.

Why is a BRICS currency unlikely?

Because a shared currency needs shared trust, and the BRICS group has very little of it. India and China are open rivals, several members have torn up contracts or seized foreign assets, and none would happily hold large piles of the others' money. Without trust inside the club, the project stalls long before anyone outside it takes notice.

The acronym covers Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, a rag-tag collection of states that share little beyond a wish to be less dependent on the dollar. India and China have fought along their border within living memory. Russia's response to the 2022 sanctions included tearing up international agreements and seizing foreign-owned businesses inside its territory, hardly the way to persuade outsiders to hold your currency. Brazil runs one of the more closed financial markets in the world. Before any joint currency could earn recognition abroad, these governments would first have to trust one another, and I would not hold your breath.

There is a neat way to test your own instinct here. Imagine someone owed you ten years of salary and offered to settle in your choice of dollars, Brazilian real, Russian rouble, Indian rupee, Chinese yuan or South African rand. Which do you take, and why is it the dollar? The deeper irony is that a genuinely trustless shared currency, one that treats every member as potentially hostile, would end up looking a lot like Bitcoin: controlled by none of its founders. That is precisely the outcome states chasing more control would want to avoid.

What are CBDCs, and what is the surveillance trade-off?

A central bank digital currency, or CBDC, is state-issued digital money that runs on a ledger the central bank owns and controls. The trade-off is blunt. You get fast, cheap electronic payments, and in return the issuer gets a complete, potentially programmable record of everything you buy. Cash is clumsy but private; a CBDC is neither.

Having spent fifteen years fighting Bitcoin, a number of governments now warm to the idea of running their own digital currency instead. Roughly nine in ten central banks are now exploring one, according to the Bank for International Settlements. The appeal is obvious: fewer cash-based crimes, tighter tax collection, cleaner data. The cost is the surveillance and censorship such a system makes possible.

Privacy in payments is usually framed as a shield for criminals, which misses most of the point. Cash has real drawbacks: it is lost, damaged and forged. But its anonymity also serves entirely lawful ends, from buying a gift for a partner you share a bank account with, to purchasing a book that criticises your government, to donating to an opposition movement. Those last examples feel abstract in a stable democracy. Under a repressive regime they can be the difference between speaking freely and not.

The politics here have shifted since I first wrote about them. In the United States the issue has flipped: rather than pursue a digital dollar, the White House signed an executive order in January 2025 barring federal agencies from creating one, and the House passed an Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act later that year (White House order). Elsewhere the experiments continue, and the two that have actually launched are the most instructive.

The Sand Dollar

The Central Bank of the Bahamas launched the Sand Dollar in October 2020, the first live CBDC anywhere, pegged one-to-one to the Bahamian dollar and legal tender across the islands. It runs on a private, permissioned chain the central bank owns outright, so it cannot move outside that closed system. Nearly five years on, adoption is tiny: the Sand Dollar accounts for well under 1% of the country's physical cash, and independent studies suggest its usage tracks government disbursements more than everyday shopping. Take-up has been so slow that the authorities have resorted to a multi-year plan compelling commercial banks to distribute it.

The eNaira

Nigeria followed in October 2021 with the eNaira, also pegged to the national currency and also running on a closed, central-bank-controlled chain. Its origins are telling: Nigeria is one of Africa's largest Bitcoin markets, with a young, technically capable population, deep distrust of government and heavy reliance on remittances from abroad, and one 2020 survey found roughly a third of Nigerians reported owning or using cryptocurrency. When the central bank ordered banks to stop servicing crypto, trading simply moved to peer-to-peer channels it could not touch. The eNaira was built to copy Bitcoin's appeal, fast transfers and financial inclusion, while keeping the state firmly in charge of the switch. The IMF's own review, Nigeria's eNaira, One Year After, found adoption "disappointingly low", with the overwhelming majority of downloaded wallets never used again.

Both struggle for the same underlying reason: they borrow Bitcoin's convenience while bolting on the top-down control that many users were trying to escape. You cannot sell people freedom from surveillance and surveillance itself in the same package.

What does the future of Bitcoin actually depend on?

Far less on price and far more on four unglamorous problems: scalability, usability, self-custody and fraud. The protocol itself is close to settled, since Satoshi froze most of the codebase back in 2009. The future of Bitcoin will be decided at what I call Layer 0, the human layer, not in the consensus rules the nerds have already largely won.

Bitcoin is probably the biggest leap in finance since the arrival of banking, but it would be foolish to pretend it is finished. The base chain settles far too few transactions to serve billions of people directly; that is the job of Layer 2 systems such as the Lightning Network, which I cover in Bitcoin scaling and the Lightning Network. Everyday usability is still awkward: wallet addresses are long strings of gibberish, technically sound and humanly off-putting. Self-custody is a genuine hurdle, since a single private key can be stolen while multi-key setups intimidate anyone without a technical bent. And the level of fraud and theft in the space remains far too high for most ordinary people to stomach.

Notice that almost none of these are cryptography problems. They are interface problems, human problems. We take some pride in Bitcoin being the dominant Layer 1 network, which was the great battle of the last decade. The next decade's battle sits below that, at Layer 0. The protocol has run long enough that its survival is itself a kind of proof, the so-called Lindy effect, and Bitcoin's beginnings in a 2008 white paper (see the origins of Bitcoin) feel a long way from today's fight, which is now the shift from early tinkerers to the general public.

What can the early internet tell us about where adoption goes?

Quite a lot, because it faced the same two problems and solved both. In 1994 getting online meant understanding protocols and configuring your own hardware just to hold a slow connection. Then software hid all of that from view while the network scaled underneath. Bitcoin's obstacles, scalability and usability, are the very ones the internet already cleared.

It is easy to forget how forbidding the early internet was: in 1994 you needed a passing grasp of TCP/IP and DNS, plus kit you set up yourself, all for a poor link to someone a couple of hundred miles away. Critics were unimpressed. In 1998 the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman predicted that the internet's economic impact would prove "no greater than the fax machine's". He was badly wrong, though the forecast would look less absurd had the internet frozen in 1998.

It did not. Today you can walk into almost any cafe on earth and find free Wi-Fi beamed to a phone in your pocket that outguns any consumer computer of 1998. I can sit in a bar in Indonesia and scroll through photos my grandmother posted minutes earlier from the other side of the world, and she has never heard of TCP/IP and never needs to. Software abstracted the hard parts away while the protocol underneath expanded to carry billions of users. Bitcoin needs to travel the same road, and it is starting to: Lightning use is growing, and projects like Fedi are building familiar, community-scale banking on top of the Bitcoin rails.

Bitcoin has clawed its way from nothing to one of the most valuable assets in the world, second only to gold, against determined resistance from entrenched institutions. The work is far from done, but much of the hardest graft is behind us. To borrow from Churchill, this is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning. Most of us who have spent time in the trenches treat broad adoption as a question of when, not if. As for exactly what the future of Bitcoin looks like, that part is still unwritten, and it is genuinely up to the people who choose to build it.

Frequently asked questions

Will Bitcoin replace the US dollar?

Not any time soon. The dollar is losing reserve share slowly, but it remains dominant and there is no ready replacement, Bitcoin included. Bitcoin may become a neutral reserve asset in the long run, yet today the network is not deep or mature enough to carry global trade. This is education, not a prediction.

What is the difference between Bitcoin and a CBDC?

Bitcoin is decentralised and controlled by no one, with a fixed supply and no central operator. A CBDC is the opposite: state-issued digital money on a ledger the central bank owns, controls and can monitor or freeze. One is designed to remove trusted middlemen; the other is designed to strengthen them.

Why have CBDCs like the Sand Dollar and eNaira struggled?

Both tried to copy Bitcoin's speed and inclusion while adding heavy state control and surveillance, which is exactly what many of their intended users wanted to avoid. Adoption stayed tiny, most wallets went unused, and in Nigeria's case people kept trading the one currency the government could not switch off.

Is a BRICS currency going to challenge the dollar?

It is unlikely. A shared currency requires trust between its members, and the BRICS states have deep rivalries and a track record of seizing assets and tearing up agreements. Until they can trust one another, a credible joint currency has no foundation, let alone the outside acceptance it would need.

Does Bitcoin have a fixed future?

No. The protocol is largely settled, but adoption is not. The remaining challenges are human ones, usability, custody and fraud, rather than flaws in the cryptography. How quickly Bitcoin reaches the next billion people depends on the software and services built on top of it, and on the choices of ordinary users.