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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

> the pandemic-fuelled a boom in digitisation, with teleworking, telehealth, online shopping and digital currencies becoming mainstream. Forty percent of Australians now work remotely on a regular basis and the future demand for digital workers expected to increase by 79% from 2020 to 2025.

Is there any actual evidence digital currencies are "becoming mainstream" or they just threw that in because it sounds cool? I still see zero use for digital currencies despite initially trying to be an early adopter, but all I saw since then was digital currencies being used as "investments" like any shares, not as actual currencies.

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Reports like these are written for clueless people who want to sound smart and "with it". When you're the CEO of a company that manufactures bathroom tiles still you're expected to have opinions about the future of big data and on how artificial intelligence will disrupt your industry.

It's a pretty safe bet that the most transformative changes in the next 20 years won't be any of those listed here.

No, and they're wrong about online shopping too.

Even in the middle of the pandemic, internet shopping never went above 40% of purchasing.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/retailindust...

And as you can see, while it had a spike during the pandemic, it's roughly back to where it would be expected to be, growing, but the pandemic seemingly had no lasting impact.

The only statement about online shopping I find on that page is “online shopping […] becoming mainstream”.

Eyeballing that chart, if it’s at around 20% now and growing about one percentage point each year, it will be at 40% in 20 years time. I would call that mainstream.

You've cut most of the quote, it's:

the pandemic-fuelled (sic) a boom in digitisation, with teleworking, telehealth, online shopping and digital currencies becoming mainstream

That is their summary of the fifth "megatrend", "Diving into digital".

When you cut out most of the quote, unsurprisingly, you can claim anyone's wrong.

Logically, they make four claims in that statement:

    The pandemic made teleworking mainstream
    The pandemic made telehealth mainstream
    The pandemic made online shopping mainstream
    The pandemic made digital currencies mainstream

The last two of them are definitely wrong and that's what we're talking about. I cannot judge the first two having not looked into teleworking and telehealth.

I interpreted that in the context of “Seven megatrends that will shape the next 20 years”, and because of that, interpreted it as a prediction.

Rereading it, you’re right that it doesn’t say that, but I still think it’s intended as one.

The report (https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/data/Our-F...; there even is a .txt version) doesn’t add detail, though. IMO, that makes that prediction one of the “bloody obvious” kind. Digital already is mainstream, and I don’t think anybody thinks that will change soon (except, maybe, those predicting a major global collapse of society)

I give it another 5 years tops, before companies begin issuing their own "currencies". Amazon coin. You can buy anything on Amazon using it, and send it between Amazon accounts. Suddenly, other services/businesses will begin accepting Amazon coin as payment for goods. That there is real digital currency. Not block chain rubbish. But a corporation leveraging their extreme digital footprint to become a de facto currency issuer, in all but name.

Diem by Meta/FB tried this and was eviscerated.

Too soon? The graph of trust in corporations vs governments hasn't yet crossed over.

Isn't company stock pretty much this? Seems to get plenty of trust over government currency ...

I guess you could say it needs to be made more fungible before it would really have this function, but ...

Isn't this begging the question?

Some people's trust in governments has been going down, and some people's trust in corporations has been going up, but it's far from universal or strictly correlated.

Personally, I fervently hope that the general populace never becomes so deluded as to think that companies have our best interests more at heart than governments do. Even a corrupted government can, with effort, be cleaned up and made to function correctly again; a self-interested, fully-profit-driven, amoral company is working as intended.

This has far less utility than AmazonCoin though. The utility of fiat currency is the ability to pay taxes in it. The utility of AmazonCoin would be using it buy things from the Amazon store. What utility did Diem offer that other currencies do not already?

My point is that AmazonCoin as a medium of exchange for any kind of goods even off platform, would be a secondary effect. The issue with so many of these crypto projects is that they have no actual utility for anything from Day 1.

Amazon wouldn't even need to make it a crypto. Literally just credits on your account. The extra bit is being able to send those credits between arbitrary accounts.

Then Amazon has to abide by KYC and all its baggage

That's not a new requirement for amazon. It's needed for EU sellers

Is this like digital coupons?

Becoming mainstream in this case probably means central bank digital currencies, not Doge being accepted by cafes. FWIW the CSIRO was effectively purged by the previous AU government and the people that are left are... people who are useful to politicians.

> CSIRO was effectively purged

We're going to need version numbers and/or hashes to accompany organization names.

There are slow but steady legal changes being made globally to enable CBDCs.

Global CBDC tracker, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/cbdctracker/

CBDCs on HN, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

>> Is there any actual evidence digital currencies are "becoming mainstream"

Two countries have adopted Bitcoin as an official currency. I would call that mainstream.

But in practice they're not actively used there, or anywhere else. It's a bit like pointing that the UN deems internet access a human right.

What can you buy in Bitcoin these days?

In those two countries, you can pay your taxes with Bitcoin apparently. That passes the bar for mainstream for me.

What other currencies that people can currently use to pay their national taxes do you also consider to be outside of the mainstream?

You are allowed to do it. How many people actually do it? Last time I checked, there was very little Bitcoin use in day to day life, and it was on a downward trend.

Or in other words, could you survive there if you insisted to pay everything with bitcoin and nothing else?

From what I've read, cryptocurrency there was more like a pipe dream or a failed bet than an actual second currency that people want to use.

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