I still remember how much I loved reading cyberpunk. During yesterday’s Satoshi story development I was struck by how much of the future envisioned in these stories has become a reality. Having a mysterious creator of a system of global reach that provides an important breakthrough in distributed computing is as riveting as anything I read back then. What’s even better is that it feels to me like we are in the early chapters with much more yet to come!

So that got me thinking about what else from those stories we should be looking for. And here are two things that strike me as increasingly plausible. First, truly distributed computing with code execution anywhere in the world. Public cloud computing is still dominated by Amazon, but Google is investing heavily, Rackspace is in the mix, IBM has acquired Softlayer and A16Z just invested heavily in DigitalOcean. The prices for access to compute power will continue to drop. But more importantly with something like Bitcoin we will have a system for paying for code execution anywhere (I will elaborate on this idea in a future separate blog post).

Second, the creation of an actual cyber space as a virtual world (built on top of truly distributed computing). When the web first came out people tried to build this on top of the web but browsers and connections were slow and more importantly VR headsets were heavy and super expensive. Now with the Oculus Rift and others in the works we will be getting fast, cheap VR. All we need then is a protocol that lets us connect virtual spaces together the way we do web pages and we will be off to endless worlds.

All of this has me massively excited about the future. In the meantime, if you do want to read something sensible on Satoshi, I highly recommend Felix Salmon’s piece “The Satoshi Paradox.”