Predictions for 2018

Bitcoin to the moooon: The futures market is starting up, so here comes a bunch more day trader action. More important, think about all the bucket shops (I even saw an "invest in Bitcoin without owning Bitcoin" ad on public transit in London), legit financial firms, Libertarian true believers, and coins lost forever because of human error. Central bankers had better keep an eye on Bitcoin, though. Last recession we saw that printing money doesn't work as well as it used to, because it ends up in the hands of rich people who, instead of priming economic pumps with it, just drive up the prices of assets. I would predict "Entire Round of Quantitative Easing Gets Invested in Bitcoin Without Creating a Single New Job" but I'm saving that one for 2019. Central banks will need to innovate. Federal Reserve car crushers? Relieve medical deby by letting the UK operate NHS clinics at their consulates in the USA, and we trade them US green cards for visas that allow US citizens to get treated there? And—this is a brilliant quality of Bitcoin that I recognized too late—there is no bad news that could credibly hurt the value of a purely speculative asset.

The lesson for regular people here is not so much what to do with Bitcoin, but remember to keep putting some well-considered time into actions that you predict have unlikely but large and favorable outcomes. Must remember to do more of this.

High-profile Bitcoin kidnapping in the USA ends in tragedy: Kidnappers underestimate the amount of Bitcoin actually available to change hands, ask for more than the victim's family (or fans? a crowdsourced kidnapping of a celebrity is now a possibility) can raise in time. Huge news but not big enough to slow down something that the finance scene has already committed to.

Tech industry reputation problems hit open source. California Internet douchebags talk like a positive social movement but act like East Coast vampire squid—and people are finally not so much letting them define the terms of the conversation. The real Internet economy is moving to a three-class system: plutocrats, well-paid brogrammers with Aeron chairs, free snacks and good health insurance, and everyone else in the algorithmically-managed precariat. So far, people are more concerned about the big social and surveillance marketing companies, but open source has some of the same issues. Just as it was widely considered silly for people to call Facebook users "the Facebook community" in 2017, some of the "community" talk about open source will be questioned in 2018. Who's working for who, and who's vulnerable to the risks of doing work that someone else extracts the value of? College athletes are ahead of the open source scene on this one.

Adfraud becomes a significant problem for end users: Powerful botnets in data centers drove the pivot to video. Now that video adfraud is well-known, more of the fraud hackers will move to attribution fraud. This ties in to adtech consolidation, too. Google is better at beating simple to midrange fraud than the rest of the Lumascape, so the steady progress towards a two-logo Lumascape means fewer opportunities for bots in data centers.

Attribution fraud is nastier than servers-talking-to-servers fraud, since it usually depends on having fraudulent and legit client software on the same system—legit to be used for a human purchase, fraudulent to "serve the ad" that takes credit for it. Unlike botnets that can run in data centers, attribution fraud comes home with you. Yeech. Browsers and privacy tools will need to level up from blocking relatively simple Lumascape trackers to blocking cleverer, more aggressive attribution fraud scripts.

Wannabe fascists keep control of the US Congress, because your Marketing budget: "Dark" social campaigns (both ads and fake "organic" activity) are still a thing. In the USA, voter suppression and gerrymandering have been cleverly enough done that social manipulation can still make a difference, and it will.

In the long run, dark social will get filtered out by habits, technology, norms, and regulation—like junk fax and email spam before it—but we don't have a "long run" between now and November 2018. The only people who could make an impact on dark social now are the legit advertisers who don't want their brands associated with this stuff. And right now the expectations to advertise on the major social sites are stronger than anybody's ability to get an edgy, controversial "let's not SPONSOR ACTUAL F-----G NAZIS" plan through the 2018 marketing budget process.

Yes, the idea of not spending marketing money on supporting nationalist extremist forums is new and different now. What a year.

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