I was reading Basic Attention Token white paper and was deeply suspicious on some of the ideas. I did not read it thoroughly, maybe other parts refute my objections.
I think the problem of advertisement industry is not just efficiency. It is AI. Google is supposed to be using AI best, but it still shows me the websites I visited yesterday.
Nobody would opt in to watch ads. How many of the dot com advertisement watching projects are live? Users just want to entertain themselves while browsing. You need to "force" ads into the content.
I also believe that blockchain is the middle man eliminator. If a company is just a middle tier, they will have hard time. So I concur with that in the white paper.
"In-device machine learning will match truly relevant ads to content from a level that
middlemen with cookies and third party tracking are unable to achieve, regardless of
how much of the user data is extracted and monitored from external models." There is no such thing as in-device machine learning. All the ML should go through big servers. In-device ML would be very simplistic, dumb ML with low accuracy and which doesn't fit its purpose at all.
However I still predict a bold offer from Google for BAT. Google is the leader in AI race. Even though they are still showing me the websites I visited yesterday. They are behind in blockchain. Google will probably find a way to grab some of the projects. It may want to buy distributed computing projects to get ahead of Amazon.
Amazon is still trying to sell me a lawnmower. Ok Amazon, I already bought it. No need for two of them. You can see AI level of Amazon from that. Projects like golem, sonm, siacoin, can give Amazon cloud headaches. Amazon may want to buy these. Or some of the IOT projects. Because it is using more and more robots nowadays.
Apple: They are very outdated in AI. Blockchain I think they are also not experimenting?
Microsoft seems to be supporting Stratis, a C# smart contract block chain. They might want to acquire those distributed computing block chain projects to get ahead of the game and stay competitive.
BMW experimented with payments at charging stations as far as I remember. Ethereum?
IBM: They are creating Hyperledger. I don't know much about it. Looks like an enterprise block chain ?
Facebook: Will try to mimic steem.
There can be a new e-commerce platform that operates internationally and block chain only that will give head aches to Alibaba and Amazon at the same time.
Hardware manufacturers will be having an euphoria for a while thanks to proof of work and machine learning. Even extremely efficient PoW projects like Burst is using hard drives. So until a PoS / DPoS algorithm arrives that could make everyone happy (i.e. less consolidation of votes) these manufacturers will have a really good time. But machine learning is not going anywhere. Until humanity makes jetsons robots they will buy more and more GPUs. AMD returned from its dust. Thanks to new CEO giving more exposure to underrepresented Ryzen project.
Uber is trying to be an autonomous car company. So if they stayed same, block chain could disrupt them. It will still hurt sharing business.
Anyway the complete opposite can also happen, these are my random thoughts. Predicting future is hard. I should see some seers. Seriously though is anyone working with seers to predict markets?