Sooner Than You Think

These Tech Revolutions Are Further Away Than You Think

Blockchain, AR, and the end of Comcast will remain the province of early adopters for a good long while.

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By Joshua Brustein

May 18, 2018 at 11:00 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the May 21, 2018 issue of businessweek.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s Sooner Than You Think issue looks at a lot of AI technology that’s coming soon, but here are a few things in the broader tech world that are likely further off than the hype often suggests.

Digital ledgers may yet end up being the solution for everything, but so far they’ve solved almost nothing. On its busiest day, the nine-year-old Bitcoin economy registered about 400,000 transactions. On an average day, Visa Inc. racks up 150 million. Most other blockchain applications are in even earlier stages—for now, many are just white papers. And it’s unclear whether the principle behind blockchain, which holds that distributed computing systems are inherently more trustworthy than those controlled by a central entity, even makes sense for most applications. The decentralized ledger is going to be far less helpful than Visa’s consumer support line when someone runs up a bunch of fraudulent charges on your account.