Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?

Cambodia is rolling out a blockchain-based digital currency system. Cambodia.

I wrote some stuff when this topic was first posted but didn't submit it. I'm glad I didn't because it gave me time to read other posts instead of my knee jerk reaction.

My thoughts that I was going to post to HN were mostly political/dystopian/economic bound. None of it related to tech. I'm glad I didn't post it.

One poster made the observation that most of the '21 predictions on HN didn't have anything to do with tech. Maybe tech adjacent, such as what FB or google impacts might be, but not much on core technology. I think this is kinda accurate of the tech industry though. Not a ton of big changes, things really slowed down this year but still notable exceptions.

Here is my revised thinking with less dystopian and political takes.

Bitcoin will rise and fall through the year, no idea how high it gets or where it settles but it's gaining popularity and it's impossible to ignore as people look for new ways to invest because people simply want to park their cash somewhere.

Space. small sats are blowing up in popularity. There's so much new tech and parts, and cheaper launch services. It's getting much easier and less technical to launch a small cube sat. There's open source flight software and constellation management software now. There's open source parts and designs for small sats. On the what-to-do-with-it side of satellites, it's also blowing up. There's a lot of new companies crunching data from small sats for everything from investing to weather observation, conservation, and military proliferation.

Drones. The war with Azerbaijan and Armenia shown how powerful military drones are over conventional warfare. Tanks are no longer relevant. You don't want to be a solider driving or even walking around on a battlefield with a drone loitering overhead. Small commercial drones are also being used in warfare too. The Saudi pipeline that was blown up used small drones with bombs attached. Drone swarms have become a thing for both artistic display and terror. There's been reports of drone swarms overwhelming nuclear plants air space, overwhelming military responses. They're too small, too portable, to be effectively combated against. I think we see a rise in counter drone tech to match the rise in drone swarms and drone warfare. FAA(?) is already implementing more controls to limit what you can do domestically with them and it will continue although, interestingly hobby aircraft has been a thing long before quad copters became regular news stories but we haven't seen them really used for makeshift war yet. I also anticipate seeing drones used for more small 'army' type applications this year.

Electric cars continue to take market share. Finally we're seeing all of the major car companies go head first into this. I think it causes increase in Tesla's popularity rather than a bad thing like saturation. We're too far away from saturation for a few years still. With this battery tech continues to improve incrementally. I don't see any revolutionary changes to battery tech over the next years but incremental changes that are enough to satiate our desires. In a few years costs will drop but we're still on the developing new tech side. Alternatives will have to be found for it to continue at the current rate of growth due to lithium supply constraints. This also leads to more banana republics among countries which mine lithium.

Wind/Solar energy continue taking market share from coal/nat gas/nuclear. Solar roofs continue to become more common place which also helps drive battery tech.

WASM gains more traction by end of the year there will be major projects from big corps running on WASM.

The URL will start to die and not matter. More and more consolidation of the internet will happen and the web will commoditize in these huge mega corps. Google is a main driver in killing the URL but all big players benefit from it. I think PWAs contribute to this. The url doesn't matter if it's an icon on your phone just like an app. Link shorteners also contribute to the decay of the URL. When I say URL is dying what I mean is that it isn't as important anymore and people don't really care. They're clicking something off FB or google and the title is all that matters.

ML continues to get bigger, but there's less break throughs and instead tightening around things which have worked and dumping ideas/applications for ml that haven't.

Deep fakes combined with GPT-3/4(?) will have some big break through applications for entertainment.

People say SV will die but I think it already has. It hasn't been about startups for 4 years now. It's all about mega corps. And mega corps have been building satellite offices all over the country/world. Now they've all gone a year with WFH and I think the satellite offices will play a bigger role for them as they become hubs people work around.

Internet availability will play an even bigger role next year and focuses on municipal broadband will become more common topic. This also prevents a lot of migration around the US where people don't really leave cities but move around to other ones to find their cultural fit.

A rise in new text based social media sites (not tiktok/insta types) as alternatives to the common ones like twitter/fb/reddit. They won't be hugely successful or profit making, but I think we're at a tipping point where it's easier to just live in your own social bubble than trying to coexist on the same sites as everyone else.

We saw quibi fail and everyone celebrated. But it did sound like a good idea, it's what substack is to writing. However phone-only kinda backfired when everyone was stuck home and not commuting on the bus.

Auction sites alternative to ebay have been on the rise last year and will continue to grow and evolve. BaT for cars blew up and now has some competitors. StockX for shoes and now everything hype has blown up. which has also shined a bright light on bots and scalpers with a few big ticket items coming to market this year. I see new opportunities to curb this or take advantage of it coming out next year.

Something better than Stadia will come out by year end. Maybe MS hedging against consoles. They'd be in a perfect place given Azure and xbox.

Mentioned briefly above but more interest in biomedical/informatics will come out. The help-protein-folding-from-home applications were a great introduction. Many new people finding interest in these fields and we see new breakthroughs next year.

SolarWinds fallout will be unnoticed by most people but the security industry will have a great year.

> 50% chance of Bitcoin crash like in 2018, 50% chance of further price appreciation but I think $100,000 is absurd for a commodity that has close to zero intrinsic value

"$100 is absurd for a commodity that has close to zero intrinsic value"

"$1,000 is absurd..."

"$10,000 is absurd..."

At this point, the burden of proof is on sceptics to show why a commodity with zero "intrinsic" value trends upward despite those sceptics' predictions during the last ~10 years.

That's true. I would include Shopify and Stripe in the shortlist.

Actually, Stripe is a really good one. Shopify, I dunno, I can't see it meshing too well with Google's current products or google even doing a good job developing Shopify further, especially after being acquired at more than 100B$ valuation. But a Stripe acquisition, I think, will be mutually profitable.