While it is bad form to sneer at the rapid fall of cryptocurrencies, some serious opportunities are emerging as a result. For those not aware, crypto miners in the past few years have been buying up pretty much every high-capacity GPU available on the market. This bid up prices and reduced availability to the point where even major cloud providers could not get their hands on current models.

When combined with Moore’s law, this has led to a situation where the average GPU hardware being used for anything other than crypto is several years old and probably four times less powerful than normal market conditions would support. But this has also led many software companies to avoid optimizing their wares for GPU. So on average, the software you are using is probably ten times slower than it should be.

That is probably the largest market opportunity in a generation, and smart companies should be looking now at how to exploit it. Speeding up your word processor or spreadsheet by ten times is unlikely to unlock any major business value. But there are several important areas which will.

Analyzing data and database systems

The most obvious area is database systems, particularly those operating on big data. The digitization of the world overall has not slowed down, and as a result, systems built on top of legacy databases are struggling these days just to keep up. This…