JeffreyBPetersen/post.md

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What will drastically change the world in the next 5 years? - reddit post

Cryptoeconomics
It's a very weird, small, young, and cross-disciplinary field, of which the most widely known example is Bitcoin. It's what happens when you intersect economics/game-theory with computer science.
Nowadays you can already do some incredibly weird stuff like write programs that implement all the core logic of a business including finances, yet don't depend on anyone in particular to keep them running. That's doable using Ethereum.
Still, for the most part things haven't yet progressed past parlor tricks that on the surface resemble digital Rube Goldberg machines for sending money across the room. I'd credit this to a few reasons:

Programming is really hard.
Security is really hard.
Designing economic incentives that guarantee people cooperate as intended is really hard.
Learning how to do something well with barely any precedent available is really hard.
Working in a field dominated by ideologues and people looking to get rich quick is really off-putting.
Spending the absurd amount of time necessary to gain the expertise necessary for original and valuable contributions to an extremely esoteric field is really unlikely.
Getting funny looks from people who equate things related to Bitcoin with hackers, pyramid schemes, internet drug dealers, and exceptionally ruthless capitalism is really isolating.
Combining all of the above is really likely to chase away anyone who'd be fine with some subset of those things.

And yet, the draw of working on an incredibly novel and difficult problem has lead to steady progress if punctuated by the scam of the week from the "get rich quick" crowd and

an

abundance

of

vitriolic

politics.
What's needed is more time and work for all the crippling issues with the field to be gradually smoothed out, and as that happens, much more interesting impacts on society can start being realized.
For starters, what are the consequences of giving everyone access to financial infrastructure that's orders of magnitude more powerful than whatever they had access to before? That includes existing financial institutions, which are very hyped up over "Blockchain".
One fun example would be making it practical to automatically buy insurance on regular household products at prices less than what it'd currently cost to fix/replace them, along with publicly listed prices that make it easy to look up how reliable something is with information that's unbiased and prohibitively expensive to falsify. Favorite shirt wore out? Here's a coupon to either take it to someone down the street who patches stuff up in their free time (automatic contracting of that type of service being another example of something newly possible) or get real cash back instead of store credit. All you had to do on your end to set it up was snap a picture of the receipt when you bought it. This whole paragraph something I came up with on the spot trying to think of a good consumer facing one, there are countless other things that will probably stay behind the scenes unless you're working with them directly.
Personally, I've found all this endlessly entertaining since coming across Bitcoin back in 2011, and it's a hobby accidentally turned profession. I think there are huge areas within cryptoeconomics beyond cryptocurrency that are waiting to be discovered with massive implications (my favorite angle is reputation systems and I hope that'll pan out some in the next few years). Cryptocurrency itself also stands to get a lot more interesting as it continues getting easier to use and various economies continue to periodically take a turn for the worse with traditional financial infrastructure left lacking for a while.
tl;dr: Hubris driven armchair economist programmers reinventing financial infrastructure from the ground up and gradually building much more empowering tools than anything currently available.