It's obvious that Bitcoin is lagging behind as a payment system with projects like Ethereum being more efficient at that, and EOS and ADA potentially set to become far more efficient than Ethereum. The problem is that these so called "Gen 3" blockchcains (EOS and ADA) both have systems incredibly similar to centralized finance, notably inflation. The inflation factor is the antithesis of what Bitcoin was created to prevent and in my opinion the original goal of blockchain seems to be lost with projects like EOS and ADA.
Which makes me wonder, could we have the technology of a payment and smart contract/dApp platform like ETH, EOS or ADA, combined with the limited, non-inflationary maximum supply principle of Bitcoin?
Because it seems to me that in order to have world-wide scalable "smart" blockchains that can be used practically for free, that inflation is necessary to compensate as a reward to miners/nodes. The one project to attempt to counter this is IOTA, but it's a centralized project, not decentralized.
Satoshi Nakamoto created decentralization with limited reducing inflation capped at 21 million, and is an immortal genius in our minds for doing so. Now how will we add scalability to the equation whilst keeping this principle, without introducing centralization or uncapped inflation? This seems like the next "hard problem". And I'm not interested in the current Bitcoin vs BCH politics, but rather a solution to this problem in a theoretical future blockchain.
I personally think of Bitcoin as quite similar to the dollar, wherein it's become the basis of the digital currency (Disclaimer: These are just my personal opinion and I am no expert, but aspiring to become one at that). With this in my mind, I think that bitcoin will be very hard to surpass or for some other cryptocurrency to stand in an even position with it. There's also the fact that Bitcoin is very famous and thus has a very large influence on the people and the market.