Interesting Tech Markets for 2019 • Hacker News Board

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#31

Post by nostrademons » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 6:36 PM UTC

sf_rob wrote: post #26

gfodor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this floor influence your choice to purchase it over some other commodity to store value (crypto or otherwise?) What do you think that floor even is? (My working assumption right now is gold could lose 99.9% of its value if it was priced based upon it's utility as a metal and not as a culturally agreed upon store of capital.)

I would think that most people buy gold as a safe-haven investment, so in this case its floor and/or non-correlation would be very important.

So your logic is that "people buy gold because other people believe it's a safe investment"? That same logic applies to crypto - if people stop believing that gold is a good investment and start believing that crypto is a good investment, gold will cease to be a good investment and crypto will become a good investment.

I think gfodor is asking something more along the lines with "What can you do with gold that you cannot do with anything else you can buy?" There are valid answers to that - gold is a catalyst in several chemical reactions that won't work with any other metal, it's corrosion resistant, it's shiny, it's a very good conductor that's quite malleable. But I'm with him in surmising that if people only used gold for its metallurgical properties, absent any historical sentimental attachment, the price would drop 99.9%. Gold is actually quite abundant; 190kt have been mined so far [1], most of which is either locked up in jewelry or being hoarded as an investment, so if people ceased to believe it was valuable there'd be a very large oversupply for the few real industrial uses.

[1] https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-...

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#32

Post by lordnacho » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 6:40 PM UTC

hackathonguy wrote: post #20

I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not always going to be the case. (Lawyer here).

Partner in a law firm told me they were starting to test various techs to search through legal documents.

You can imagine NLP being quite useful in sifting through piles of old cases, a step beyond simple text search.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#33

Post by ollerac » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

hackathonguy wrote: post #20

I'd love to hear more about perceived opportunities in legal tech. For some reason, the legal industry seems very averse to change, but I'm sure that's not always going to be the case. (Lawyer here).

I think this has a lot to do with perceived value and complexity from the side of the developer.

For me: I don't know the first thing about law and the perceived value of building something in that space is low compared with, for example, healthcare, where I feel like a lot of people can more easily see the benefits on real people.

I think if you can clearly define the areas where either the perceived value (for the developer) is really high or the perceived complexity is relatively low, that's where you'll see the next developments in this space.

I'd be curious to know where you think these areas are.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#34

Post by rndmize » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

tehjoker wrote: post #29

Ah defense. It's just common sense that we should pour money into the military. We're just out to make money, there's definitely not an entire political viewpoint entangled in this "market opportunity". Those crazy radicals that are against killing pointlessly for imperial gains don't understand the real world. In the real world, we need the military to make the world safe for capital. WW1 was a smashing success, as…

Use of force is a separate problem from the development of weapons. I don't really have a problem with startups doing weapons development - someone is going to do it, and I have a hard time seeing how the world would be better if China or Russia took the lead on this.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#35

Post by lwb » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 6:49 PM UTC

jsherwani wrote: post #2

Fascinating read. I never thought of Devsumer as a category until now. It explains the recent spike in interest in this space: * Slack acquired Missions * Trello acquired Butler * GitHub launched Actions * Zapier’s success ($35m ARR) * The ridiculous numbers of Zapier clones out there

Not to mention Apple's Shortcuts -- haven't used it but it seems to be in the same vein

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#36

Post by tehjoker » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 6:56 PM UTC

rndmize wrote: post #34

tehjoker wrote: post #29

Ah defense. It's just common sense that we should pour money into the military. We're just out to make money, there's definitely not an entire political viewpoint entangled in this "market opportunity". Those crazy radicals that are against killing pointlessly for imperial gains don't understand the real world. In the real world, we need the military to make the world safe for capital. WW1 was a smashing success, as…

Use of force is a separate problem from the development of weapons. I don't really have a problem with startups doing weapons development - someone is going to do it, and I have a hard time seeing how the world would be better if China or Russia took the lead on this.

I would point out that if the US is already spending more money on arms than the next several countries combined, I don't think this is the relevant issue. If another power was strong enough to threaten our defenses, that would be one thing but clearly there is something much bigger going on (I would say it is the US empire, at least according to a senior official in the Bush administration: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community). I hesitate to make this argument because I think they should be abolished, but if we have nukes, why do we need new "defensive" weapons? The only reason is to be able to control events in other parts of the world to the benefit of the people that start the wars.

This perspective would imply that we should not be encouraging our citizens to devote their energies to devising ways to kill (i.e. form startups around "defense").

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#37

Post by nostrademons » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 6:58 PM UTC

strgrd wrote: post #3

"I am still quite bullish that a basked of cryptocurrencies will be worth in the trillions within the next 10 years. The primary short term driver for crypto value with be the generational replacement of gold as a store-of-value for a specific subset of the population. The longer term drivers of crypto value will be new forms of programable money and on-chain securities." What subset of the population is going to rep…

There's been this pattern within crypto where each new bubble brings in new people, while the people burned in the last bubble leave in disgust and long-time hodlers from 2 bubbles ago cash out their winnings and do other things with their lives. Many of the most active developers and evangelists from 2011-2013 are doing other stuff now, and the ones that haven't are engaging in juvenile pissing matches with their millions (cf. Roger Ver and Craig Wright). Many of the folks burned by Mt. Gox left in disgust in 2014. Many of the current big exchanges (eg. CoinBase) were founded by people who got in after the 2011 bubble. Ethereum was founded by folks who got in after the 2013 bubble, and were initially skeptical of this whole cryptocurrency things. There's probably a wave of new cryptocurrency startups being founded in garages & dorm rooms right now by people who were too young to really participate in the 2013 or 2017 bubbles but don't want to miss out on the next one. The folks who got burned by ICOs are mostly already gone, or they're sitting around being bitter and predicting Bitcoin = $0.

It's not all that different from the dot-com boom; I (mostly) missed out on the bubble from 1995-2000 since I was in high school at the time, but kept studying computers & web technologies in college and caught the mass adoption wave afterwards. I had a number of classmates and coworkers (at internships), slightly older than me, who rode the dot-com bubble right into the ground, losing both their jobs and their life savings. Many of them left tech altogether and became economists or traveled abroad or bounced around between temp work. They basically swore off investing in tech stocks, but one of the folks I'm thinking of thought she'd make a pretty penny by buying 3 houses and investing in hedge funds in 2007.

It's human nature to believe that bad things that happened to other people aren't going to happen to you, and as a species we're remarkably bad at learning from other people's experience. The set of folks actually burned by ICOs is a relatively small subset of "all people" though - IIRC at the peak of the bubble there were only about 10M Bitcoin investors in the U.S. and only a small percentage of them actually invested in ICOs. That's like 3% of the population, still very much in early-adopter territory.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#38

Post by mattnewton » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #31

sf_rob wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that most people buy gold as a safe-haven investment, so in this case its floor and/or non-correlation would be very important.

So your logic is that "people buy gold because other people believe it's a safe investment"? That same logic applies to crypto - if people stop believing that gold is a good investment and start believing that crypto is a good investment, gold will cease to be a good investment and crypto will become a good investment. I think gfodor is asking something more along the lines with "What can you do with gold that you ca…

That’s still far more uses than if people think a particular coin has lost its value. When thinking about a store of value for loss-averse people, the intrinsically useful, always-been-valuable mineral I can hold in my hand seems like a psychological winner over numbers in a blockchain that require an industrial society with the blockchain to keep churning. My take was that people were speculating in bitcoin to get rich, not to weather government collapse.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#39

Post by kamarg » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

eladgil wrote: post #16

zechs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a big shift to expect given gold's track record as a store of value going back to almost the beginning of recorded history?

It is a big shift and I could be wrong. However, horses are also something we used for transportation going back to the beginning of recorded history... (lots of other examples too). Crypto has a lot of aspects that make for a superior store of value (easy to move, seizure and censorship proof etc). Obviously, also has some drawbacks too like difficulty to custody...

I feel like the recent 51% attack against Etherium shows that seizure and censorship proof isn't strictly true.

Re: Interesting Tech Markets for 2019

#40

Post by theptip » Tue, Jan 08, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

mattnewton wrote: post #21

eladgil wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the comment - My hypothesis is that people growing up today in their 20s and 30s who would have normally bought gold in their 40s and 50s will buy crypto instead. So it will be a generational shift versus a replacement for existing older gold holders. (Could be wrong of course).

I don’t buy it - gold has a natural floor, for one thing. I can sell it to make pretty earrings or fancy computer cables. The risk of it losing all its value is basically the risk that we will move to a post-scarcity Star Trek style society with matter replicators. Crypto.. not so much.

The mere existence of a price floor isn't particularly relevant; if your nest egg goes down to 1% it's basically the same as going to 0%. You've still lost your shirt.

I don't know what the floor for industrial uses actually is though; if it's 10% of the current speculative price that might be germane, but if it's lower it might not.