The regulatory environment will play a big role on how the cryptocurrencies/assets evolve in the long term. The industry started attracting some regulatory interests in 2014 but still not extreme attention as it was a relatively small market with basically no risk for the general economy.

We now sit at 150bn market cap, I would say that the risk for general economy is still fairly contained, maybe a lot of people get deceived and lose money, others make money, but nothing too concerning from a government point of view.

But now let's say in 1 year we are at 1 trillion, and growing. Fortunes being made, fortunes being lost due to hacks&scams, at some point the government will start to have strong regulations about it and wanting to control these money flows.

Tech developments like the Lighting Network also make it possible to monitor/control btc transactions differently than up to now, will some governments somewhere only allow transactions that meet some requirements? I could imagine this happening at some point, hidden behind a "terrorist protection act" of some sort.