Alex Muir

A couple of days ago I bought a Nexus 7 tablet to play around with a concept for an app. Colour me impressed.

Packaging was slightly below Apple’s standards, but it inconsequential. The product had a feel of quality and heft. It works. Setup was a breeze. It’s fast, flexible and easy to use. I don’t like the on-off button on the side, I would much prefer it on the front but that’s very minor.

I installed Twilight, an Android version of Flux, which dims the screen at night - something I really need with iOS 7 and it’s super-bright whites.

Developing on Android is easy and fun to get started. Within an hour I had a little app working on the device. No cost, no complex downloads.

Developing is fine and good, but I think Android is going to dominate the iPad into oblivion over the next couple of years. The Nexus 7 is £200 off the shelf at retailers, or easily found for £180 on offer, or £150 on a hot deal. Apple won’t come close to this price. Tablets are first and foremost a web and video consumption device. I’d say the Nexus 7 works better than my iPad for this. At a significantly lower price. I could have picked up a Hudl for £120 which would be pretty similar.

I have a feeling that tablets will be commoditised before phones. Phones have an important social element - iMessage helps here, and apps are arguably more important on this smaller form factor. I’m fairly locked in to a couple of subscription apps that I’ve bought for my iPhone. This isn’t the case with the tablet, where I almost exclusively use the web browser.

I might write some time about iOS 7, but having lived with it for a while I think it’s brought almost nothing new. I dislike the design strongly - it is new, not better.

I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.

– Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

As I write this, a Bitcoin now costs over 400 USD, giving a market cap of $5billion.

I am told that Bitcoin has a limited supply, and I have to take that as fact because I do not have the skills to investigate. In the same way that buyers of gold or diamonds are told they cannot be manufactured. If tomorrow it turns out that gold can be printed out of milk and charcoal then the gold market will tank.

If we ignore that risk, then we ask what Bitcoin’s market cap could feasibly be.

Bitcoin will take some chunk of the following markets -

Drugs

The annual value of the drugs market was estimated at $321bn in 2003 But estimating on such an enormous scale is unlikely to be accurate, let’s look locally… Scotland’s drug market was valued at £1.4bn in 2009.

Now Bitcoin is suitable for some drug transactions - end-user purchases by mail-order, and also potentially for wholesale purchasing and transfer of money. £250,000 in cash takes a holdall to move so there is obviously an appetite for alternatives in wholesale transactions. The €500 note is also much harder to use now in Europe, which was the cash of choice or anything over £100k.

40% of Scotland’s drug market is estimated to be heroin. I think these end users will never have access to, or use Bitcoin. Even now they don’t have credit on their mobile phone (if they even have one).

Prostitution

Unlikely, but possible. Adultwork is transacting tens of millions of dollars of business in the credit card system. It can’t be long before they are slapped with some regulation and forced into the Bitcoin system - at least for payouts. Clients and service providers may also prefer this as it keeps transactions off bank statements. Personal services will still be cash though.

Dark porn

There can’t be any doubt that Bitcoin is already the currency of choice for child porn and other deep underground sexual business. I don’t know what the value of this economy is, I don’t think it can ever be known. It must be in the hundreds of millions of dollars though.

Blackmail, ransomware and extortion

Receiving ransom by Bitcoin has to be a textbook use case. Plus this sort of business is 100% profit and so BTC exchange rate fluctuations are less of an issue than in business with slimmer profit margins. This could be kidnapping, piracy, straightup blackmail, and ransomware. Analysis suggests that just one ransomware operator was clearing $5m per year, this is going to balloon as bitcoin becomes more mainstream and a higher percentage of users pay up.

Black hat economy

The black hat hacking world will be fueled by Bitcoin. What’s it worth? No idea. DDOS attacks, spamming, virus creation, day-zeros , botnets, click-fraud. That has to push us into the billions.

Money transfer

Right now, transferring $1,000 USD to the Philippines via Western Union will cost 3% after currency spread and fees. I can see a future for Bitcoin here, but not while the exchange rate is so volatile. Bitcoin varies by 3% every hour. A more stable currency though and it becomes a real alternative.

US online gambling

Previously hundreds of millions of dollars.

eCommerce

The widespread use of Bitcoin for anything other than 90%+ profit businesses is going to depend entirely on its stability. No-one wants to be selling physical goods for a currency that falls by 10% in a day. This isn’t so apparent in the current environment where Bitcoin is clearly trending upward.

__I think that assuming Bitcoin retains its integrity, it’s market cap will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. That is to say, at least 20x what it is today. __ However, I think the likelihood of technical issues with Bitcoin to be between possible and probable.

Things don’t get done because it’s hard to find people to do them. This happens too often. And at the same time there are capable people who want to do things, but the two don’t connect.

I want to do something about this.

When I was at school, there were Adult Education centres, or night schools, which taught much cooler stuff than I was learning. I longed for the time that I could learn welding or woodworking instead of practicing handwriting. By the time I was an adult, these education centres had mostly closed.

Those that haven’t closed now focus on either soft-skills, employability, or block release apprenticeships. They aren’t at all geared up to the hobbyist or dabbler.

For a time I think there was a void, but it feels like it’s being filled. Just watch this beautifully produced video from Frank Howarth where he teaches how to build a lawn chair.

Online, there is a solid business model in providing freemium training videos. For programming there are screencasts, but there are also video producers for many mainstream activities now. And the quality of their productions is amazing.

Ryan Bates runs [Railscasts](http://railscasts.com/], where he has produced a couple of videos each week since early 2007. Some videos are free, the more advanced videos are only for subscribers. Subscribing is $9 a month, and my feeling is that he has at least 3,000 subscribers - a very healthy income.

Marc Spagnuolo has a similar format for woodworking. He publishes some videos free to Youtube, but also runs a paid-for community called the Wood Whisperer Guild where plans are provided and lengthier projects tackled.

Again with woodworking, Steve Ramsey runs a Youtube channel called Woodworking for Mere Mortals which has 140,000 subscribers. He doesn’t seem to have any premium content - but recently has been experimenting with a kickstarter-style subscription platform called Subbable.

Painting a car? There’s LearnAutoBodyAndPaint.com. Learning a language? Try Radio Lingua.

The real world

Some skills can’t be learned from videos. I tried learning to plaster by watching Mastering Plastering, a well produced training DVD. Complete waste of time.

But earlier this year I did a four-day plastering course at The DIY School and since then I’ve got fairly good at skimming walls and ceilings. If I went to a publicly funded college to learn plastering, I’d be going through an application process, paying more and spending two evenings a week for A WHOLE YEAR.

Up the amateurs.