Happy New Year! 2018 might be a disaster

Happy New Year! 2018 might be a disaster: 
"Well, we did think that things couldn’t get crazier after 2016, and yet I’m pretty sure almost everyone would agree that 2017 beat it in spades.
So what’s up for 2018? 
...So here are a few potential wild cards for 2018, along with the hope that my end-of-year column next year says that none of them happened.

• Electrical breakdown. Earlier this year we saw what experts called a ”game-changing” cyberattack on critical infrastructure. “The malware was most likely designed to cause physical damage inside the unnamed site ... It worked by targeting a safety instrumented system, which the targeted facility and many other critical infrastructure sites use to prevent unsafe conditions from arising." We have lots of important stuff, not just in the electrical world, but in all utilities, that’s connected to the Internet. This turns out to be a bad idea. Sooner or later, someone is going to figure out how to bring large sectors of the American grid down — or, I should say, someone who already knows how is going to decide that they want to do so. 2018 just might be the year....

• The Bitcoin bubble bursts: Bitcoin has been skyrocketing, and I confess that I wish I’d put, say, a thousand bucks into it a few years back, when my crypto-enthusiast friends were encouraging me to. But many people think it’s in a bubble, and all bubbles burst.  Perhaps they’re wrong, but if they’re right, many people — especially in Asia, where millions of investors are driving up the price according to the Wall Street Journal — will wind up losing their shirts and angry. Asia doesn’t need destabilizing right now, with North Korea and China rattling sabers. (And for added fun, North Korea is hacking Bitcoin exchanges.)...

• Some sort of pandemic:  We’ve had scares with SARS, bird flu, Ebola, etc., but so far none of these really broke through into a global threat. Sooner or later, something will, and the public health community’s response to these earlier outbreaks wasn’t entirely confidence-building. Over a decade ago, then-Senator Bill Frist was calling for a crash program to vastly speed up vaccine development and production. It’s still a good idea."..."

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