I was thinking about this last night a bit while looking back at some podcasts I follow which had mentioned Bitcoin when I was following them back in 2011, namely Security Now with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte. It made me wonder why I hadn't gotten into Bitcoin until just this year, and the answer was roughly along the lines of (1) "It wasn't as exciting to me then as now", and (2) I was put off from looking into it until it was too late, maybe due to the fear of difficulty of the task?
So given that I figure, what technologies will end up being like Bitcoin in the future, which I should be looking at now, will likely be those which are off-putting to me on a procrastination level, and which seem slow going to a certain extent.
Two technologies stand out to me most: (1) Machine Learning / AI, which while it's made great strides these past couple of years, still has much potential, and (2) Quantum Computing, which seems off-putting and intimidating now, but which will likely be important to know stuff like Shore's Algorithm, how to read and manipulate Bra-ket notation, brushing up on differential equations and probability theory, etc. Not to mention finding people to talk to and meetup with on these topics.
The only other area that I can think of which is even more off-putting is genetic programming, and not simply the CS topic, but like programming actual genes using CRISPR and related technologies.