The Future of Futures
In a recent blog post, @EdFelten announced that his team are working on a Bitcoin-driven exchange where people can trade or gamble "shares" based on the outcome of events. It sounds like a distributed computing approach to securing a gambling on future events (currently limited to those that can be measured). In other words, people will be able to gamble on nearly any kind of event. Almost anything can become a futures market - career trajectory, family planning, or even crimes.
This could easily become a competitive kickstarter for day-to-day events. This may seem innocuous at first, but imagine a world where seemingly arbitrary outside forces had a vested financial interest in the outcome of your life. What happens when people are able to "invest" in the outcome of any event - with a preference for those that can be quantified and/or measured?
Early days, but this is both a fascinating and potentially terrifying way to think about how we engage with each other going forward. Regardless, as Felton notes, the distributed architecture being built to support Bitcoin will be applied to a wide variety of exchanges and interaction types. It's early days to be predicting the commercial and sociological influence of distributed super computing, but what's less clear is the future of, well, futures.