Seeing the future

Seeing the price of Bitcoin tonight, I’m lamenting how I could be eliminating swaths of debt had I followed my own advice and invested in mining more ‘coin many years ago.  I knew then that Bitcoin would either explode in value or fail completely in a year or two. I’ve always had a knack for seeing the future when it comes to technology.  I don’t think it’s any sort of “market savvy” or other such financial thing, just a sensitivity to quality which happens to often correlate with commercial succes (over a long enough timeline). I saw the same potential in Tesla Motors (the only thing I recommend people invest in other than Bitcoin), and I saw it in NeXT & Objective C (realized when the iPhone came to market).  I saw it in REST-enabled IoT hardware (creating my own implementation in RESTduino years before it became a standard) and the list goes on. Now I see the same potential in my Raiden project.   I haven’t shared a lot of the details about my long-term vision for the project, and so far it has been focused on establishing a baseline to measure performance of future work against. But I’ve learned so much already and combined with my knowledge of industry trends and decades of high-performance computing experience, I’m uniquely suited to divine a high-quality solution to many current and near-future challenges facing high-performance computing applications. While I feel like I could get more out of the Mark I system, I also feel like I’ve learned enough to move on to Mark II. Any additional time spent on Mark I, while perhaps enjoyable, is probably throw-away optimization work that will teach me little about improving the performance of future generations. Also I’m anxious to get started on some of the new problems to tackle in building Mark II and beyond. I’m not sure how to execute the remaining phases of the project in a way that will allow me to realize the potential it has in a timely fashion or in a way that will ensure it reaches the target audience. On one hand this makes me feel like I should be spending more time on publicizing the project and securing resources so I can dedicate more time to the work. On the other hand I’ve seen so many projects die because their creators got so tied-up chasing those things that they lost sight of the actual work and never got around to building anything. Since funding Mark II is probably something I can do alone, and I can probably fit working on it into my “spare time”, I plan to keep marching toward that goal alone. With any luck I’ll find some interested collaborators along the way who can help me find a way to dedicate more time and resources into the effort when it’s time to begin work on Mark III.