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Ask HN: What's the next Bitcoin? (re: innovation, not cryptocurrency)

6 points by jnbiche ↗ HN
I remember in early 2011 being completely overcome with amazement and awe over Bitcoin. The technical and societal innovation was at a level I had never seen before so early, far before a technology reached broad acceptance.

Unfortunately, Bitcoin has faltered in many ways, and I was pretty disenchanted with the community by 2013. (yes, I sold mine far too early, but I still occasionally run across a forgotten 0.5 BTC somewhere, which is nice).

So my question is: what's the next Bitcoin? It doesn't have to be related to fintech or cryptography. Rather, what's a now relatively unknown project or technology that could have world-changing outcomes?

5 comments

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throwawy1231231
Some ideas to throw out there:

* energy backed cryptocurrency that incentivizes renewables adoption.

* "off-grid" P2P internets powered by mobile devices

* decentralized storage/compute that actually works ( IPFS? )

terrantech
I've been thinking for a few years now that a mesh-networked mobile-device-based reddit/twitter-type community could be really powerful.

Anyone can submit a story but ideally it would have some kind of not-voting system for quality screening (long term users earn the right to approve/bury? No visible vote-counts to stop reddit-syndrome).

Fully anonymous, in the sense that it shouldn't leak your mobile number, device ID, name, any of that. A hash/something of your device ID creates a unique identifier for your account, stopping people making lots of fake accounts. One per device. It should also let you use a nickname, with no need to sign up (maybe by default it's like 4ch, your hashed device ID is your trip code, then you can optionally set a nickname if you want).

Mesh networked means it's good for countries with strict/filtered internet. Users should be able to sideload the app manually in case app stores are blocked (pass it around on a USB stick).

No idea how data would be stored, that's above my skills. Ideally not centralised, but that's probably unrealistic. I guess maybe something like torrents would work. You're constantly caching/sharing what you've looked at for other people within a few steps of your mesh point, but centralised databases spread around the world to fill in the gaps if no one has a cache of what you're trying to look at?

SirLJ
Nobody knows where then next mania will come from, but for me personally, I am really looking in to the advances of the truly global high speed internet: low orbiting satellites, kites, balloons - whatever works

Once we have it working properly, I am retiring, buying a catamaran and sailing around the world...