A big innovation for crypto in the next few years may be a shift in the nature of mining. Maybe the computation that goes into pure mining could dovetail with computation that happens anyway, similar to the Recaptcha model, where solving a puzzle serves the purpose of both user verification and also AI training for autonomous vehicles and OCR.

I’m not sure of the technical hurdles (and if I were, I would have more to contribute) but it seems that there is an important problem to solve there. Also it might “re-de-centralize” Bitcoin mining from massive server farms in China to a truly distributed network as it was intended.

Whatever the environmental costs, it still beats the physical mining of precious metals. But still could probably be improved further by more digital innovation. And let’s melt the damn pennies already before mining more copper.

Also interested to see how asteroid mining shapes up in the next few decades. Maybe SpaceX or Planetary Resources finds and exploits huge quantities of extraterrestrial gold and platinum to bring home, only to flood the commodities market, dunk the price, and find that digital scarcity disrupts the whole concept of precious metals altogether.

That’s all a long way off, but would be a fascinating ironic twist for a science fiction story about crypto, if anyone is interested in writing it. 🙂