Prewave

Market shifts, before consensus.

A free weekly newsletter tracking papers, code, patents, package ecosystems, and operator attention to catch meaningful shifts early.

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Wave 1 / 4
Bitcoin
The Signal
A pseudonymous email to 400 cryptographers. Two replies. Zero press coverage.
From:Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshi@vistomail.com>
To:cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date:Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:10:00 -0700
Subject:Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper
I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.

The paper is available at:
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
~400 subscribers · 2 replies · 0 press articles
This email started a $1.2 trillion asset class
bitcointalk.orgBitcoin › Marketplace
L
laszloSr. Member
May 18, 2010, 12:35:20 AM
I'll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas.. like maybe 2 large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having left over pizza to nibble on later. You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place.
👁 312 views↩ 18 replies
10,000 BTC = $1.1 billion today
$100 invested in 2009
$0
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2008
Bitcoin
BTC / USD $0.01+1.26B%
$100K $50K $10K
'09'11'13'17'21'24
And then it happened again.
AMZN $2+12,600%
$200 $120 $20
'06'09'12'16'20'24
2006
Cloud
Wave 2 / 4
Cloud
The Signal
Jeff Barr wrote 200 words about a new storage service. He had a plane to catch.
AWS News Blog
Amazon S3 — Simple Storage Service
by Jeff Barr · March 14, 2006 · ~200 words
Amazon S3 is storage for the internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. [...] I've got to catch a plane to Silicon Valley in a few minutes, or I'd write a lot more.
200 words. $600B industry.
YHacker News
Amazon EC2 – Virtual Server Hosting (aws.amazon.com)
8 points · toddh · Aug 24, 2006 · 11 comments
serverops_dan · 4h ago
Why would I rent a virtual server by the hour when I can just colo a box for $100/month? Seems like a solution looking for a problem.
11 comments. $90B/yr revenue now.
$100 invested in AMZN in 2006
$0
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Same pattern. Different decade.
Wave 3 / 4
Mobile
The Signal
500 apps on launch day. Press called them "novelty toys." 10 million downloads in 72 hours.
E
engadget
Joshua Topolsky
twitter
LIVE from WWDC: Jobs announces App Store launching with 500 applications. "This is going to be a really big deal." Most look like toys honestly.
about 3 hours ago from web
Reply · ★ Favorite
"Toys." $935 billion economy today.
YHacker News
Apple: 10M App Store downloads in 72h (apple.com)
14 points · iphonedev · Jul 14, 2008 · 23 comments
webdev_skeptic · 2h ago
Nobody will pay for apps when the web is free. I give it 18 months before devs realize there's no money here.
Supercell sold for $8.6B eight years later.
$100 invested in AAPL in 2008
$0
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2008
Mobile
AAPL $6+4,667%
$220 $140 $30
'08'11'14'17'21'24
You'd think we'd learn by now.
NVDA $4+5,075%
$160 $80 $20
'17'19'21'22'23'24
2017
LLMs
Wave 4 / 4
LLMs
The Signal
A paper on "attention." Eight authors at Google. Then an API that wrote code from plain English.
arXiv:1706.03762 [cs.CL]
Attention Is All You Need
Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit,
Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin
Google Brain · Google Research · University of Toronto — Submitted June 12, 2017
Abstract
We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train.
15 pages · Trained on 8 GPUs in 3.5 daysCitations: 140,000+
GitHub · Trending · June 2020
openai / gpt-3
GPT-3: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
★ 340◎ 89 forks"gpt" repos on GH: 12 total
@early_builder commented Jun 13, 2020
I gave it a plain English description and it wrote working React code in 10 seconds. API is $0.06/1K tokens. I'm building a startup around this tonight.
12 repos → 45,000 → 200,000
$100 invested in NVDA in 2017
$0
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The pattern is always the same.

01
Weak signals appear
Mailing lists. GitHub repos. Obscure papers. Visible to anyone. Noticed by almost no one.
02
Early adopters build
Stars spike. Threads multiply. Devs quit their jobs. The signal strengthens.
03
You read the headline
TechCrunch writes about it. VCs pile in. Window closes. You think: "I knew it."
What the newsletter watches

The next shifts
already exist.

They usually appear first in technical and builder data, not in mainstream coverage. Prewave watches those layers first.

BenchmarkLead
New arch beats transformers on 3 benchmarks — 40% less compute
arXivGitHubHN2h ago
Cost CurveWatch
GPU inference cost dropped 94% in 8 months — new provider undercuts market
HNReddit8h ago
Open SourceLead
Major lab open-sources reasoning model — Apache 2.0
GitHubarXiv5h ago
Cross-DomainWatch
"Stripe for AI agents" — 4 repos, 2 HN threads, 1 arXiv paper
GitHubHNarXiv1d ago
See how the method works

Prewave

Early market shifts, weekly.

Market shifts
before consensus.

Prewave — The Market Intelligence Newsletter
What lands in your inbox
One free weekly issue on the shifts worth tracking while they still look early.

Built for founders, investors, PMs, and operators who care about timing, source quality, and where technical change is actually moving.

Papers, code, patentsThe newsletter starts where technical change shows up first.
Attention as confirmationPackage ecosystems and operator chatter help separate durable movement from one-off noise.
Why nowThe point is timing: what still looks early, not what already reads like consensus.
No fluffNo paywall, no sales call, no trend recap. Just evidence and timing.

Free to join. Weekly cadence. Built from public-source market intelligence.

When a shift feels obvious, the timing edge is usually gone.

📡

Stay ahead of the next shift.

Free weekly market intelligence on early shifts across papers, code, patents, and operator attention.

Questions

What is Prewave?
A free weekly market-intelligence newsletter on emerging technologies. Each issue focuses on the few shifts worth tracking while they still look early.
How is this different from just reading Hacker News myself?
HN is one attention layer. Prewave is built from cross-source evidence across papers, code, patents, package ecosystems, and early operator attention. The point is convergence, not one hot thread.
Is it free?
Yes. The newsletter is free to join.
Who is Prewave for?
Founders, investors, product managers, and operators who care about timing, source quality, and where technical change might move next.
How early do you actually detect signals?
The goal is to surface shifts while they are still concentrated in technical and builder signals, before the broader market story hardens around them.
Is the analysis AI-generated?
The writeup is AI-assisted, but the signal comes from tracked public-source data and model-based ranking. We keep the evidence linkable and reviewable.
How often do you send it?
Usually once a week. If something breaks fast and matters, we may send an extra signal.