Major movie theaters and other retail stores in Phoenix, Arizona, accept bitcoin. It may not be 100% mainstream yet, but crypticurrency is going to explode in a big way
While I do agree that crypto-currencies might be a bit overblown, if you're right at 2% if HN readers having them, I'm actually more inclined to believe the OP is right. That's a lot of people.
To me though, the only thing crypto-currencies currently are good for is buying illegal drugs on the internet. There just isn't any reason to use them over regular money the rest of the time.
We've just started to fully appreciate the possibilities of the Blockchain particularly. I was reading some academic paper on analyzing and querying blockchain transactions and I found it absolutely outstanding. I'm also keen on seeing what large commercial projects are built on the Ethereum platform.
I personally think the market of add-on or web browser's extension.
Why? Because, web browser is second most software used after operating system by a normal computer users. If you are developer you use editor and web browser, if you are writer you use world processor and web browser, if you are market person you use trading software and web browser and so on. I mean web browser is something used by everyone.
We have written applications ( for computer and mobile device ) for most useful sotware - operating system to reach out our users. Now, it is time to target next software used by everyone. You might create a website but it will only be there until user do not close that tab. But, with extension, you will be in constant connection with user.
Currently thid market is uder estimate as many developer consider that it is not something that consider as programming. But, I think every website specific limit to connect users. and at that situation, add-ons will come to rescue.
I see the browser becoming the OS period. I didn't realize this until I got a ChromeBook and realized (with crouton) I can do everything I normally do on my Linux notebook.
All I need is a browser and a terminal since my development environment consists only of tmux/vim via Crouton chroots and Plex Web/Youtube/Google Music for entertainment.
my three guesses (my company is in 1 of these areas):
consumer internet privacy and security (think barracuda for the home market -- above and beyond a standard router/firewall possibly with active L7 features)
consumer and enterprise storage management (they literally can't even make enough ssd's right now, people and companies are hoarding data and can't manage it effectively or reliably)
rural and wilderness area wireless internet (people will start moving out of cities again and will want the same > 50 megabit low latency service).
Most people are terrible at predicting the future in this way. Some of the most accurate predictions sound like (or are) jokes at the time, like when JK Rowling was writing her first book as basically a "welfare mom." She did a lot of the writing while her baby napped at some eatery owned by friends/relatives. She would make jokes to the effect of "When my book gets famous, it will put your place on the map!" That basically all came true, from the book being famous to it making the place she wrote it famous too.
But when you go back historically, predictions of what life would be like "now" all left out the world changing invention of computers and internet.
There is a scene in the movie "The Graduate" where he is at a party and everyone is telling him what he should go into as his career because it will be big in the future. One person tells him "Plastics!" This was a joke at the time, a ridiculous statement. Years later, the plastics industry used that bit in a TV commercial.
If you really, sincerely believe "The Future is all about X industry," you aren't telling people that on the internet. You are quietly behind the scenes buying more shares in X or getting training to work in X or otherwise trying to make sure you are the firstest with the mostest in X.
5 years out is not that hard, since it is basically which technologies that are either just out, or coming out soon will be successful. 10 years is more challenging, 20 impossible.
Five years ago, tablets were basically cutting edge new tech. They were insanely expensive and crappy as hell. They often faced limitations in functionality because a lot of websites did not accommodate them. I know because I bought two of them 5.5 years ago and it was $2000 worth of computers and lots of stuff just did NOT work.
Today, you can get a tablet for under $50 and Google is (or has) split its search stuff into PC and mobile search and is actively optimizing stuff for mobile because mobile search is eating the world. I seriously doubt anyone expected mobile to take over like this when it was new tech.
In contrast, "net books" seem to have gone extinct. I think that was supposed to be The Next Big thing -- until tablets came out and began eating their lunch.
5 years ago, over 100 million tablets had been sold worldwide and the iPad was entering its 4th generation. Your description is more apt for 10 years ago.
Well, according to Wikipedia, the history of tablets goes back to the 1800s. But I know for a fact that I bought two tablets on December 31st, 2011 that were priced at $2000 (after getting a 2 year internet service contract plus a 20% employee discount to reduce the price, I paid $800 up front) and it was kind of the hot new item at the time. And I know for a fact that proliferation of apps we have now was not the norm back then. I had enormous difficulty getting things done on it and I noticed that painfully because I essentially had no other access to computers at the time. I can now do all kinds of things on a tablet bought for under $50 that I could only dream of and wish for 5 years ago.
The first generation iPad launched close to two years before your example in 2010 at $499.
I agree with the previous remarks - the tablet industry was pretty well established 5 years ago and hardly cutting edge tech - 10 years ago is definitely a better comparison at this point, with the crappy tablet devices Microsoft were pushing at much higher price points then.
Some mode of online social interaction that seems ridiculous now but will seem obvious in retrospect. This will be milked for ads and acquired by a big player while me-toos nibble the ends in the aftermath.
The market will grow from zero to millions in this time, but it will be entirely consumed by one of the big five and everyone will just think of it as a Google feature or something.
Health care. The boomers are entering their prime health care spending years, and Obamacare will engender huge industry profits from "spend all you want - someone else will pay the bill!".
We're going through something similar to the industrial revolution, lots of people will lose their job to AI (or still be employed, but with significantly lower wages - even previously untouchable professions like lawyers, doctors and programmers).
To avoid riots, these people will be fed either through existing welfare programs or new basic-income style ones. But the old guard will want to make sure they don't blow their money on hookers and blow and booze, so anyone who peddles "here's how we can figure out which of the welfare recipients is non-compliant with their spending habits" is going to make a killing.
Sad, but inevitable in the current political climate.
Maybe in the next 50 years, but not the next 5. There's about a 10-1 marketing to actual breakthrough ratio for AI changing our economy. I agree it will eventually, and has made some inroads, but it won't anytime soon to the extent where we have to solve problems of demographic shifts.
There are few people I'm aware of who think to the contrary who are actually working at a technical level in the field of AI, and not founders of a startup riding buzzword funding or who have financial or PR interests to hype AI.
I'll add a caveat that the invention of general AI would accelerate this timeline. I think it will require paradigm shifts, not feature-augmented/ exotic ensembles of neural networks with RL layers, or other approaches possible with current techniques, but think it is still more possible, sooner than AI skeptics believe, but still beyond 5 years.
I think the nature of these revolutions is that they happen slowly but invisibly until one day all of a sudden everyone is aware of them. I wrote "AI", but it's not just AI, it's a lot of things that are coming of age.
Some "Minimum wage jobs" are disappearing -- a local fast food joint now has about 1/3 of the employees it had a couple of years ago: they have better automated machines in the kitchen, and a smart ordering kiosk that most people use (though there's still a person at the register, for people who are uncomfortable with the kiosk or requests that are not available through it).
Translators, as a job, have almost disappeared (relegated to those needing "an official translation"). That happened in the last 10 years, starting with an awfully funny and weird altavista or google translate that would give you results that could only be meaningful if you had some familiarity with both languages - down to modern translation which, while not perfect, is readable and understandable.
Professional photohgraphers for newspapers used to command a $3,000/day salary just 10 years ago. Now it's closer to $300/day, if they can get it at all - because there's already someone on the scene, with a smart phone camera -- the pictures are horrible, but people are willing to give them for credit, so a photographer is unneeded.
The army of people working for Google/Facebook/Amazon to moderate user content, is being decimated.
It's started to happen to lawyers; It's not prevalent yet, but it is eating the more "mechanical" parts of a lawyer's job - finding relevant historical cases and summarizing them. Computers are now slightly better than the interns that used to be assigned to these jobs. In 5 years, they might be better than the experienced partners at these kinds of jobs.
It's closer than most people think in many, many jobs. Truck drivers will likely not be completely replaced in 5 years, but their jobs might change to "24 hour shifts" in which they are allowed to sleep until the automated truck wakes them up to deal with some condition.
You know, writing down what's in a picture, was almost sci-fi 10 years ago, and right now you have Google, Microsoft and ClariFi offering this as a cheap API.
Have you sent someone money internationally before? How about across different banks? Typical transfers process at around 3-5 days. With the help of cryptocurrencies like Ripple, Steller and the like. Transfers happen in seconds. This will grow because now, banks will utilize this technology to get rid of the old one (Swift anyone?) and will save banks lots of time and money.
Crypto currency is very useful for transfers to difficult regimes and across many borders but I fail to see the case for a value add for distributed trust between banks (since there's generally an existing trust model anyway). There are other distributed technologies on the horizon where a cryptographic ledger is going to be super useful, but I don't see it for banks.
I send through transferwise. It's very fast and the exchange rates are very close to the forex rates - it was a lot easier and cheaper than using bitcoin.
The trick is to match flows of cash so they money isnt actually transferred internationally - my cash from the uk was sent to someone else in the uk and my US bank account was credited from some other US-based bank.
When a transfer is made from country A to country B, the money gets first transferred from the sender in country A to local Transferwise account in country A (avoiding fees and conversions). Then they send the money from local Transferwise account in country B to the recipient in country B (again avoiding fees and conversions).
The magic is how they ensure that the local Transferwise accounts in each country have enough money to do the transfers. They own a bank account in every country they operate in, and the money flows between those bank accounts. They need to move money between their local accounts in each country while minimizing the amounts transferred, but also minimizing the fees and conversions. When they actually move the money is up to them, they just need to ensure they have enough on each account. I guess there's a lot of variables to optimize for, and it would be interesting to know more details of the process.
I've also seen a company called Azimo trying to do a similar thing, but I haven't tried them yet.
Second this. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, billions of people are going to come online over the next five to ten years. If (according to the World Economic Forum: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/2-billion-people-worl...) there are really 2 billion people unbanked, we stand to see cryptocurrencies and cell phones lead to an explosion of people connected to the financial system.
The medical cannabis industry!
- Science: as we pass the obstacles of regulation, more studies will be able to confirm (hopefully) what we suspect so far.
- Zeitgeist of our times is "going green".
- Damaged image of big pharma.
a reaction to technology overreach in ours lives. People are sick of their phones, laptops, sleep tracking, social media. We want to reclaim our mind back. There is place in LA that does Buddhist retreat where you sit in silence for 1 week, its booked 8 months in advance.
Low cost cloud providers. No idea why there's not a low cost competitor to AWS, GCE, and Azure. And I don't mean just a VPS. Full service cloud with equivalents for EC2, ELB, S3, Lambda, etc.
Outcompete Amazon (especially) on prices? Waiting to see who'll achieve that feat.
That aside, there's a cost threshold beyond which it wouldn't makes sense to offer cloud services at such ridiculous prices. If anything, I actually think compute prices might increase in future as demand for cloud services become globally outrageous, from Alaska to Zagreb.
I'd like to see the opposite of admining your own custom stack on vps or cloud instances. What I want is a really full featured walled guarden where compute storage and bandwidth are all metered and you just pay for what you use. Super cheap if you can live within the constraints. I'm talking mainframe style web app hosting, one giant server, you pay for a slice. No admining or provisioning of instances required.
The 2 billion people coming online in the next decade will be from the developing world and the developers serving them wont pay the kind of fees that AWS et al currently charge for cloud services.
The atheist generation will have grown up and begin to look for someone to tell them everything will be okay. It's a good opportunity to start a new religion.
A new religion based around what? Is this religion supposed to actually be believed? This is one of my favorite videos which explains why new religions don't have as much credibility https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PEg_Oys4NkA You have to watch the video to probably get the basic idea. I'm not Jewish despite the video focusing on Judaism.
Which direction is the zeitgeist blowing? From my perspective, it seems that there is a real and ongoing erosion of local communities (labor, religious, or otherwise) that are replaced, often times, by a shallow virtual existence. It does not have to be a religion in the conventional sense, just something that attempts to give meaning to the meaningless.
Wrote a whole long response beginning with "my gut feeling is that markets are driven as much by politics as technology so Hacker News may not be the place to ask." Then said, man, that sucks.
I'm hoping for a market to end all markets, where the product is money. You sign up with a company, it pays you. All anyone wants is cheap, cheaper, free. Getting paid tops that.
So maybe solar panels are just getting competitive, but getting paid to put them on your roof, that's hot.
Turo is hot.
Universal basic income is hot. Maybe politicians don't have the imagination to make it happen, but we do. Secretly every employee in the world yearns to load the part of their job that even a monkey could do into a spreadsheet, go home, and still get paid. Given the permission to automate our own jobs, we’ll do it gladly and in large numbers. The only thing stopping us is really really, ridiculously rich people, and people with no imagination. Somehow we have to find a way to pay them as well, and keep paying them, no matter how much they don’t want to get paid.
Indexing. Who needs Google when you have your own index? And I don't know about you but I can't get passed 16 pages of search results on google even though it has billions of results for the search term "contact us" (have it set to 50 per page)
80 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadThe total market cap for cryptocoins will grow from $50 billion today to $1+ trillion in the future.
To me though, the only thing crypto-currencies currently are good for is buying illegal drugs on the internet. There just isn't any reason to use them over regular money the rest of the time.
We've just started to fully appreciate the possibilities of the Blockchain particularly. I was reading some academic paper on analyzing and querying blockchain transactions and I found it absolutely outstanding. I'm also keen on seeing what large commercial projects are built on the Ethereum platform.
Why? Because, web browser is second most software used after operating system by a normal computer users. If you are developer you use editor and web browser, if you are writer you use world processor and web browser, if you are market person you use trading software and web browser and so on. I mean web browser is something used by everyone.
We have written applications ( for computer and mobile device ) for most useful sotware - operating system to reach out our users. Now, it is time to target next software used by everyone. You might create a website but it will only be there until user do not close that tab. But, with extension, you will be in constant connection with user.
Currently thid market is uder estimate as many developer consider that it is not something that consider as programming. But, I think every website specific limit to connect users. and at that situation, add-ons will come to rescue.
consumer internet privacy and security (think barracuda for the home market -- above and beyond a standard router/firewall possibly with active L7 features)
consumer and enterprise storage management (they literally can't even make enough ssd's right now, people and companies are hoarding data and can't manage it effectively or reliably)
rural and wilderness area wireless internet (people will start moving out of cities again and will want the same > 50 megabit low latency service).
But when you go back historically, predictions of what life would be like "now" all left out the world changing invention of computers and internet.
There is a scene in the movie "The Graduate" where he is at a party and everyone is telling him what he should go into as his career because it will be big in the future. One person tells him "Plastics!" This was a joke at the time, a ridiculous statement. Years later, the plastics industry used that bit in a TV commercial.
If you really, sincerely believe "The Future is all about X industry," you aren't telling people that on the internet. You are quietly behind the scenes buying more shares in X or getting training to work in X or otherwise trying to make sure you are the firstest with the mostest in X.
Today, you can get a tablet for under $50 and Google is (or has) split its search stuff into PC and mobile search and is actively optimizing stuff for mobile because mobile search is eating the world. I seriously doubt anyone expected mobile to take over like this when it was new tech.
In contrast, "net books" seem to have gone extinct. I think that was supposed to be The Next Big thing -- until tablets came out and began eating their lunch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tablet_computers
Humorously:
"Mobile to overtake fixed Internet access by 2014" was the huge headline summarising the bold prediction from 2008 by Mary Meeker...
http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketi...
I agree with the previous remarks - the tablet industry was pretty well established 5 years ago and hardly cutting edge tech - 10 years ago is definitely a better comparison at this point, with the crappy tablet devices Microsoft were pushing at much higher price points then.
Augmented Reality, I would suspect in a year or two we will have the first successful product.
Services and entertainment for aging populations.
Real estate auction services, Trump is going to have to sell of a lot after going to prison.
The market will grow from zero to millions in this time, but it will be entirely consumed by one of the big five and everyone will just think of it as a Google feature or something.
We're going through something similar to the industrial revolution, lots of people will lose their job to AI (or still be employed, but with significantly lower wages - even previously untouchable professions like lawyers, doctors and programmers).
To avoid riots, these people will be fed either through existing welfare programs or new basic-income style ones. But the old guard will want to make sure they don't blow their money on hookers and blow and booze, so anyone who peddles "here's how we can figure out which of the welfare recipients is non-compliant with their spending habits" is going to make a killing.
Sad, but inevitable in the current political climate.
There are few people I'm aware of who think to the contrary who are actually working at a technical level in the field of AI, and not founders of a startup riding buzzword funding or who have financial or PR interests to hype AI.
I'll add a caveat that the invention of general AI would accelerate this timeline. I think it will require paradigm shifts, not feature-augmented/ exotic ensembles of neural networks with RL layers, or other approaches possible with current techniques, but think it is still more possible, sooner than AI skeptics believe, but still beyond 5 years.
Some "Minimum wage jobs" are disappearing -- a local fast food joint now has about 1/3 of the employees it had a couple of years ago: they have better automated machines in the kitchen, and a smart ordering kiosk that most people use (though there's still a person at the register, for people who are uncomfortable with the kiosk or requests that are not available through it).
Translators, as a job, have almost disappeared (relegated to those needing "an official translation"). That happened in the last 10 years, starting with an awfully funny and weird altavista or google translate that would give you results that could only be meaningful if you had some familiarity with both languages - down to modern translation which, while not perfect, is readable and understandable.
Professional photohgraphers for newspapers used to command a $3,000/day salary just 10 years ago. Now it's closer to $300/day, if they can get it at all - because there's already someone on the scene, with a smart phone camera -- the pictures are horrible, but people are willing to give them for credit, so a photographer is unneeded.
The army of people working for Google/Facebook/Amazon to moderate user content, is being decimated.
It's started to happen to lawyers; It's not prevalent yet, but it is eating the more "mechanical" parts of a lawyer's job - finding relevant historical cases and summarizing them. Computers are now slightly better than the interns that used to be assigned to these jobs. In 5 years, they might be better than the experienced partners at these kinds of jobs.
It's closer than most people think in many, many jobs. Truck drivers will likely not be completely replaced in 5 years, but their jobs might change to "24 hour shifts" in which they are allowed to sleep until the automated truck wakes them up to deal with some condition.
You know, writing down what's in a picture, was almost sci-fi 10 years ago, and right now you have Google, Microsoft and ClariFi offering this as a cheap API.
It's not going to magically become better. This is the thing lurking in the shadows that will cause major problems.
Have you sent someone money internationally before? How about across different banks? Typical transfers process at around 3-5 days. With the help of cryptocurrencies like Ripple, Steller and the like. Transfers happen in seconds. This will grow because now, banks will utilize this technology to get rid of the old one (Swift anyone?) and will save banks lots of time and money.
This is a solved problem in most of the world, except for US and Canada
(Inside SEPA they're almost like a domestic transaction as well though it takes a couple a days)
The trick is to match flows of cash so they money isnt actually transferred internationally - my cash from the uk was sent to someone else in the uk and my US bank account was credited from some other US-based bank.
When a transfer is made from country A to country B, the money gets first transferred from the sender in country A to local Transferwise account in country A (avoiding fees and conversions). Then they send the money from local Transferwise account in country B to the recipient in country B (again avoiding fees and conversions).
The magic is how they ensure that the local Transferwise accounts in each country have enough money to do the transfers. They own a bank account in every country they operate in, and the money flows between those bank accounts. They need to move money between their local accounts in each country while minimizing the amounts transferred, but also minimizing the fees and conversions. When they actually move the money is up to them, they just need to ensure they have enough on each account. I guess there's a lot of variables to optimize for, and it would be interesting to know more details of the process.
I've also seen a company called Azimo trying to do a similar thing, but I haven't tried them yet.
That aside, there's a cost threshold beyond which it wouldn't makes sense to offer cloud services at such ridiculous prices. If anything, I actually think compute prices might increase in future as demand for cloud services become globally outrageous, from Alaska to Zagreb.
AWS seems cheap, but egress is where they get you.
I second this.
The 2 billion people coming online in the next decade will be from the developing world and the developers serving them wont pay the kind of fees that AWS et al currently charge for cloud services.
Also, some form of artificial companionship.
I'm hoping for a market to end all markets, where the product is money. You sign up with a company, it pays you. All anyone wants is cheap, cheaper, free. Getting paid tops that.
So maybe solar panels are just getting competitive, but getting paid to put them on your roof, that's hot.
Turo is hot.
Universal basic income is hot. Maybe politicians don't have the imagination to make it happen, but we do. Secretly every employee in the world yearns to load the part of their job that even a monkey could do into a spreadsheet, go home, and still get paid. Given the permission to automate our own jobs, we’ll do it gladly and in large numbers. The only thing stopping us is really really, ridiculously rich people, and people with no imagination. Somehow we have to find a way to pay them as well, and keep paying them, no matter how much they don’t want to get paid.