There is going to be another fork with bitcoin, and it is going to be odd and obscure–as politics always is. The fork is not one that is chose by the community, but rather is something that will be forced upon them. This is how government regulation within the bitcoin community on a whole will be preformed. I believe that over the next few year we will see a large national security apparatus that will start ‘mapping’ bitcoin addresses, where they are associated, and with whom they are associate with.

We are already seeing the Bitcoin Foundation leading the charge into regulation.  As much as I would like to think that regulation could be a good thing, I simply cannot believe it when it is coming from a government whose actions can only be defined by that of a tyrant. I believe that a deal shall be struck with the devil that allows for bitcoin to be used for commerce, but there will be a tax at the point of purchase, along with some sort of ‘logging’ of what  bitcoin address it may come from. This will then be used to create a map of the bitcoin ecosystem to go after larger tax resisters, and operations like the Silk Road.

We must take into consideration that these companies are already sharing data and executives with the government spy agencies. Palantir Intelligence, which seems to have had a hand in building PRISM, is funded by and has several ex-PayPal executives at it. This is on top of several of the major tech giants already sharing untold amounts of data with the NSA–for us to believe that the government would not try to map bitcoin and rob it of its privacy capabilities is silly. They will try to map it, and they will most likely be successful.

I believe that this will lead to a sort of political forking. I think the most viable solution would be for the creation of Zerocoin alt currency that people could simply mix into, but there could also be an evolution of more sophisticated mixing services, similar to the one on BlockChain.info.  Anyway about it, I do not suspect that this cat and mouse game with the government and crypto-anarchists will end simply–I think that this is the start of a very sophisticated game of building a better internet, and currency on top of privacy that is assured by math, and not the political promises of corrupt men.