Ask HN: What’s the Next Big Thing?
Let’s assume I asked this question in 2010. Your answer should’ve have been cryptocurrency. It is now 2021, what’s the next big thing?
Obvious answers:
- Biotech, our ability to handle large amounts of data and compute should enable biotech to make huge strides forward in all sorts of ways. Personalized medicine (pill made for you etc) and so on.
- AR/VR, we've been talking about this for a long time but it seems like Apple will be launching something fairly soon for AR. It could very well kickstart a new boom. VR has been steadily building for about 10 years and will continue to do so. Better headsets means more widespread adoption. Nearing a tipping point now I think.
- Getting 2 billion more people on the internet. Should allow for more niche products.
Outside the box:
- Online reality TV with avatars. An online world where people play different roles and you can choose which viewpoint you want to watch from. Online 24/7 with professionally built narratives happening in real time.
See GTA RP NoPixel streams on Twitch for an early example.
BTW, what about "second life", I don't know how much it has grown.
I think AR/VR is that it's being used like film was in the early 20th century. There are obvious technical challenges to overcome, but what it lacks is an industry of creators and auteurs to define new forms of art. The mistake is that the revolution will be driven by artists working out of garages and warehouses, not VC funded startups that only focus on technical challenges trying to corner the markets.
For me the killer apps would be replacing my monitor/TV/tablet/etc and providing an IRL add blocker. The technology for that is definitely not there yet.
There's constant talk of not being able to fill positions, but in many cases the pay or working conditions aren't good enough or the company is too picky about some minor attribute on a resume. 30% of millennials are looking to change companies after the pandemic has subsided (I think that's more of an if it subsides). I think this says a lot about how the increasing segment of the working population views work and jobs today. In some areas, it's more lucrative to be on support programs than to work too. I think this will increase as the cost of benefits continues to increase. At the opposite end of the spectrum people would rather hit big on crypto or options and check out of the work force before actually contributing to society. I hate looking at job postings due to the inflated fancy working of the duties section, the pay is usually just about the same as my current job if it's even listed (and the range can be huge - like $80k-120k is a 50% increase. How is that real/helpful?), and they all make it sound like they're saving the world when they're really just going to stick you in a boring app that does some basic CRUD for the business.
These are just my views. Maybe they are wrong. I do think something big will happen in the work force over the next decade.
Kinda sounds silly. But I wouldn't be surprised if it actually happens. At some point people are gonna realize they can only depend on themselves and that is going to lead to some creative ideas
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and speculation is the most obvious use case right now, and I don't think that will change over the next 1-2 years. But I'm convinced that many more will follow.
I was just a little bit too young when the dot com boom happened, mostly playing games and hanging out in IRC channels during those times. I always imagine how cool it would've been if I had been a capable developer back then. The blockchain ecosystem(s) are the first technology in the last 10-20 years that feel the same - it's incredibly early with people hacking away trying to build basic things using a completely different model of the world.
I didn't "get it" for the longest time, ignoring cryptocurrencies for many years. But once I "got it" it completely changed my way of thinking. I don't know about the timeline, but I'm more convinced than ever that it's the next big thing and that the centralized internet as we know it will no longer exist in a few decades.
For the record, I hold neither BTC nor ETH (besides what I use for development) and I didn't get rich from it.
It seems almost tautological, if you need a strong system of guarantees in the real world, you usually have some central agency involved, and that agency needs to be trustable. Blockchain is still subject to garbage in garbage out after all.
You also seperate concerns (Chinese wall) of data provider and settlement entity, with the latter being trustless.
We just need much lower fees and environmental impact.
The first paragraph, I can kind of follow it, you're saying you can check someone's track record for providing information? But that's the least important part of reputation systems isn't it?
Being able to vet the reputation hasn't been artificially inflated is really the meat of that. After all, what's stopping someone from making up a history? It requires the same central authority current systems do right?
The second paragraph is where I totally get lost. I have a vague understanding of each term, but how they come together doesn't seem to add up for me
Say you want to buy crop futures on Ethereum using smart contracts. The contract is “trustless” it will execute according to the Ethereum rules. Once set in motion no one can interfere.
The problem is that the contract needs to know something about the outside world.
That’s where an oracle comes in: a provider of information to the smart contract.
The oracle could lie about the crop price as a scam to manipulate the market.
We must trust it so there are 2 things “who” runs it and also have they been providing reliable data in the past.
With this in place anyone can now write up futures contract or options contract or weirder stuff based on the price of the crop.
And other people can participate independently of both the oracle and the contract writer.
This is like taking apart the commodities market and turning into Lego to build anything.
The advantage over normal finance is probably akin to the advantage of Linux over Windows. You can hack Linux. You can compile everything. It is yours.
It’s hard to say what this will lead to but I can see a lot of cool ideas coming from it.
NFTs as they are called, Which are tokens for things instead of money could add more. You could resell your games not at GameStop but on an automated marketplace on Ethereum. Just say “I want to resell this one for $40” and forget about it. One day $40 rolls into your account and the game stops loading up from steam. And that’s a simple example.
I could hack an IFTTT to say sell 3 games but only if I won’t make the rent. Of course this is in a future where you can pay your rent from crypto - but if they get the fees down you could have PayPal like transmitters between transferring money for small fee or even free.
> crop futures on Ethereum using smart contracts
Why would I do this? You mention:
> The advantage over normal finance is probably akin to the advantage of Linux over Windows. You can hack Linux. You can compile everything. It is yours.
What does this actually mean? Like this combination of words? I don't get it, especially "It is yours.". The best I can picture is maybe you're saying this is like owning your access vs being beholden to a brokerage, but you still need to trust some coordinating body for these futures right?
Futures are covering an underlying asset, the part where you buy it is the tip of the iceberg to their functionality and the players that facilitate it still need to exist, so what's a concrete example of something new I can do by using crop futures on Ethereum that isn't self-referential to crypto?
The closest I saw to that was your IFTTT example, but how does any of that rely on Ethereum? Isn't the automated marketplace the enabler here? Like what changes about your example
> You could resell your games not at GameStop but on an automated marketplace on Ethereum. Just say “I want to resell this one for $40” and forget about it. One day $40 rolls into your account and the game stops loading up from steam. And that’s a simple example.
if the automated marketplace is based on fiat currency vs smart contracts? You still need to trust some sort of central entity to transact these games after all
Again, I know it might sound like I'm just not trying to picture this, but I really am, and it's just so ethereal to me. Every part of this I grasp ostensibly leads back to "ok but what is crypto adding here?". And the answer to that always seems to involve more crypto, which doesn't help move forward over that all important question
At a basic level there isn’t anything you can “do” in crypto (outside of gambling / tax evasion / other crime ) that you can’t do in the banking system.
If you are looking for the “wow it can do that!”, it doesn’t really exist.
Crypto offers a way for more companies to provide the services banks and exchanges provide. I wouldn’t say anyone could do it due to the technical knowledge required.
Crop futures - this was an example. More useful stuff will come along.
My Linux analogy is that anyone who I spoke to in the 90s “I might install Linux” would laugh. Why not just use Windows. What can Linux do that Windows can’t? It’s for geeks etc. It then found a use case in powering most of the web by being the OS of choice for web servers.
I think this is a good analogy because Linux still requires you to be technical and Ethereum will require this, but companies will build services to make it easier for ordinary people to get use of the system.
Business is all about trust so a completely trustless and still useful outcome is probably not possible.
I probably am not explaining this well enough and that’s my fault. It might be a tacit thing where if you use cryptos a little bit (in a playful way, small amounts of money) and keep an open mind you start to understand. Once you’ve done an exchange of one token to another with no central party, no company involved in that exchange with the price figured out by a contract no one can manipulate, to me that’s when you feel the potential of the tech.
That said there are so many problems with crypto it has some way to go. Number one is carbon emissions, number two is scams and number three is technical difficulty. I think these could be solved longer term.
I don't think there was a single moment in time it clicked for me. It was a combination of using some of the DeFi services, listening to to other people in the space, and trying to build stuff. I recommend learning by doing and trying to build something on Ethereum, ideally something that connects to existing services. Just using the developer tools will give you a sense of how early the space is.
I think it clicked for me when I understood the combination of:
- All data and code is freely available to everyone. Imagine you can literally copy Google, including all their code and user data, because you believe their user experience or ad model sucks. If you make a better version of it that attracts users you will get rewarded.
- You don't need business models such as subscriptions, ads, etc, because payments are natively built into everything.
- Everything is composable. That's huge. Imagine every service and website on the internet exposes everything as a global well-defined API that you can integrate into your own applications without restrictions or permission. These lego blocks may enable completely new applications.
- You don't need to manage infrastructure for storing data, or servers.
- Value, in all kinds of forms, is freely tradeable and transferable
A lot of things we use today can be built with drastically better business models, no intermediaries that extract money from you, and correct user incentives.
- I don't think that ETH specifically is the next big thing, just blockchain technology like ETH in general. There is lots of competition, both on top of ETH as well as different approaches.
- The price itself isn't strongly correlated with usage or value. Sure it's used for gas, but the price is mostly driven by speculation for now. So you never know what's "already priced in"
- Timing is hard. The space is still extremely nascent. There may very well be a few more crashes and cycles before it all settles down and becomes more mainstream. The timeframe here could be years. I think it's totally possible that crypto prices crash 90% tomorrow - but it's already too big to go away completely.
So I don't really have an opinion on the current ETH price, I'd just be gambling.
Decentralised tech doesn't win just because it's decentralised (centralisation has a lot of advantage when it comes to easy of use and implementation)
What real business or personal problems does blockchain solve that alternatives don't? Few
javascript is universally hated, yet everyone uses it. I don't understand why.
For your time, I can also donate some amount to a charity of your preference.
Decentralized is really useful for many uses, but the monetary aspects are making it less useful, I think.
I’ve read some plans and thought they would be cool if it wasn’t going to devolve to people just getting money.
I think things like BitTorrent are successful because there’s not someone rentseeking over the operation extracting value as cash.
Ethereum’s issue, I think, is that the cost of transactions is much higher than the true cost. If it just focused on incentivizing distributed compute then there would be more benefit.
I’d rather have manual trust like seti/boinc did decades ago and greater functionality.
'Remote Work' is a big secular shift and that's going to be massive.
'Applied AI' is still just starting. We're a little bit past 'peak Hype' and high expectations, but we also know AI is 'real' and will be fairly broadly applied so there's a lot of legitimate opportunity.
There are 5B people coming out of poverty who need tech and want 'stuff' - so adapting classical systems to those areas is a big deal. Usually it requires localized knowledge, but that's possible for many. Retail Banking in Africa for example, may not resemble anything like Western Banking because of the lack of so much key infrastructure, so 'mobile first, trust-based' kinds of systems will likely lead the way, and out-compete the legacy institutions trying to put physical branches into every town.
Solar still has some room to run and go much lower in cost with such low marginal costs that we will produce 3-4x of demand and throw away surplus if energy storage is not available.
- SpaceX
- ULA
- Rocketlab
- Firefly
- BlueOrigin
- Virgin Galactic / Orbit
- Relativity Space
- Astra
More here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_co...
I find companies like Momentus Space - solving a real problem with real customers - much more exciting, interesting and important than the obsolete-before-first-flight megaprojects by ULA or BO.
Momentus was enabled by the improvement in spaceflight economics brought about by Falcon 9. Starship should really get things going.
There will be massive opportunities in that change. And for those facilitating it massive gain.
I also think we’re due an abundant energy breakthrough at some point but hard to predict the exact nature of it
Imagine buying something with crypto at your local supermarket.. You'll stand there awkwardly waiting for $blocktime before you can say thank you, have a nice day.
The next big thing? I'm gonna say/hope universal basic income, a gradual change from work-for-money-to-live economy to work-for-pleasure-and-enjoy-living nonconomy..
If it only was so easy. If it was, xDai would already be a huge deal, but it's not, at least not yet.
I think, not only are there way more parameters than what you list, but the ones you list are not as important as you think they are.
I don't know the next big thing of course, always thought the future is bright, but seeing how everything evolving, our greed to make money, which is pretty an illusion considering we are species living on a planet in space, individually will eventually die, even the consequences of our actions may result turning this habitat to a non livable habitat for our species and others as well.. What is wrong with us?
Combine this with Neuralink's chip, so I can orchestrate creating a design system with my thoughts, not endless hours of clicking and designing pixel by pixel.
Consider one common pattern. Startup CEO grows successful startup, then the board inevitably replaces said CEO with a more traditional CEO and organization structure. What made the company innovative then slowly goes away as it becomes entrenched in the same paradigm as the established companies the startup had been disrupting. Rinse and repeat.
Why must this evolution be so one-way and so rigidly predictable? Eventually, organizations will be able to flexibly shift to nearly any reasonable state, identifying which resources are needed to initiate such a change as well as when and where to apply them.
Telcos work closely together with the well known cloud providers to utilize the edge. The model will likely be a revenue share model. Telcos might develop a neat new revenue stream. Once those "killer user cases" like the Apple Glasses hit the market I could imagine Telco stocks to rise.
I also expect optician stocks to benefit from the Apple glasses. Apple might use the optitian retail network to bring the Glasses to the customer.
Cryptocurrency and blockchain have not been a big thing the last ten years, in that no one has solved a business problem or built something useful with it. My phone uses ML every day to tag the pictures on my phone. Developers use containers for deploying projects. These are shipped solutions.
So if crypto is going to be big, this is just the ground floor. We don’t know who the winner will be and how it will look —- who will be Google and who will be Alta vista? So far crypto and blockchain are just for speculators.
- Someone will have to disrupt friendship, there are dating sites and social sites but people are still lonely and grow older. social norms have to adapt
- The oculus quest is a great seller and it deserves it, but i still think VR is missing killer apps, maybe there won't be any. WebXR will become a great medium though
- Neighborhood communities adapted for remote workers to move in and out. Can be themed (e.g. a specific national community). Startups will help them grow and organize. Airbnb was just the beginning.
- Brain implants. Biology is a complete tangled mess and making biotech work is hard. If we don't live long enough to achieve immortality, we can at least hope to download our brains for later use.
- Animal communication. This is super crazy but i think AI will be used to understand how to communicate with animals which could be revolutionary.
This decade marks the end of the baby boomer generation so the post-WW2 world order will largely become irrelevant, despite the trumpeting of nationalist tensions.
in terms of low-hanging fruit with outsized returns: there's a ton of applications in machine learning. Google and Facebook are pouring billions into these ML models and they're all uploaded to github for us to use, free of charge. All you need is a bit of domain knowledge in how to apply it.
in terms of tech I'm actually looking forward to: the new space race, quantum simulation of biochemical reactions, GPT-X with multitask learning for video, audio and text.
in terms of impact on the world: things like height and IQ are highly heritable and almost solely determined by your DNA. It was never possible to predict these things, but with linear transformers it's looking kind of possible if you have enough data. I'm morbidly curious at what would happen if a government with utilitarian views on human rights started practicing Eugenics via this kind of phenotype prediction...
I know the definition of "a lot" is somewhat flexible, but cryptocurrency has made only a tiny fraction of one percent of people wealthy.
This could allow us to predict in silico what a given gene might do.
BioScience. So, so, so many things out there we ALREADY know/have/are capable of, but are held back from exploding us forward due to religiously founded governance. Younger generations are less tied to the latter, allowing the former to actually progress.
Both of these will happen faster than we think.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/article-four-etfs-...
Personally, I am worried about all the IoTs getting hacked either deliberately or by error.
What would be the affect of a major solar flare? Or a SuperNova?
But unless we trigger a global thermonuclear war in the next 19 years, I think humanity as a whole will make it to 2040, and at least from what I'm reading, most climate scientists seem to agree about that.
We are most likely going to pass a tipping point by then, though, and humanity might not make it to 2100 (or at least those that do will not be having fun lives).
I don't really care about IoT's getting hacked. Everything gets hacked nowadays and things are still running.
Wow, I was about to ask why you were concerned about a supernova, since our sun is not in danger of doing that for billions of years, but holy crap, it's a real thing that's happened to the Earth an estimated 20 times over the past 11 million years, and is estimated to have warmed the earth 5-7 degrees Fahrenheit each time it has, and there are 6 potential supernova candidates close enough to affect us right now, even.
I mean it seems like it's still very unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, but yeah, that would be like almost instant catastrophic global warming.
- Tactical forecasting/Super forecasting
- Highly improved warehouse robots
- First blockbuster VR Game
- More personalized ads in the real world
There were many chances given. Alt-coin Faucets, Keybase giveaway (not a scam) literally giving 'free' cryptocurrencies (Not ICOs.)
They are not doing this anymore and now if you held them, well you're up >10,000%
> Your answer should’ve have been cryptocurrency.
True. Mostly everyone here was too focused on the 'tech' 'engineering', 'how to get into FAANG companies' and the 'cryptography' of cryptocurrencies to even care about 10x-ing their investments at the time.
Many cryptocurrencies (and some are still scams) were perceived as ponzi scam-coins, until they rocket off for little to no reason and now the 'mainstream' catches up. The actual winners are the ones who dared to risk >$5k on a 'scamcoin', 5 years ago and now it netted them 20,000x ROI.
> It is now 2021, what’s the next big thing?
No one knows, but the answer always starts somewhere from a tiny select few in the know or a fringe site. It could be from anywhere. Including this site.
If I had a pound or dollar for every idea or business I've thought wouldn't work then I'd be a rich man
You can pick any risky investment that's currently doing well and say after the fact "look how wrong you were to doubt this". It doesn't mean that investing in that thing at that time was ever the right thing to do. People have been losing money for centuries following similar lines of thinking.
Cryptocurrencies, blockchains, distributed ledger technologies etc have been bashed pretty comprehensively by economics and finance experts as well as tech ones, because they are a bad solution to almost every problem they have been thrown at.
Arguably Bitcoin is technologically inferior to other cryptos and there was really no reason to think Bitcoin would remain the dominant crypto in 2010-2017. Betting on Bitcoin a decade ago was like betting on Yahoo or Myspace stock because you thought search engines or social networks would change the world -- even if you were right, you would be wrong. It's rare that the first of anything remains on top for long because better iterations always shortly follow. I strongly thought ETH was going to surpass Bitcoin's dominance early days of ETHs rise, but I was wrong. IMO anyone who was investing in a technologically inferior crypto currency that had clear scaling issues and almost non-existent usage as a currency got lucky.
As for whether I've changed my mind now, I still have no idea what the point of Bitcoin is. It will never be a useful currency so that leaves it's main use case as a store of value and there are plenty of assets which hold their value with less risk, so why would I ever use it?
That said, I'm still more bullish on ETH and I'm glad it's been getting more attention recently. But even then I'm not convinced that the blockchain will be used outside of very niche applications and I'm not sure if it's as revolutionary as some people suggest.