Lets check this article from August last year, it kinda went down the memory hole for some reason but there is some juicy information in there that has not been talked about here before:
>https://www.americanbanker.com/news/the-race-to-connect-smart-contracts-to-the-real-world
(citing the growth of its web edition.[7] AmericanBanker.com receives more than 1 million page views per month)
now the interesting part about the article is that bit here:
>"Oracles are the new miners in the blockchain world," Patrick Murck, special counsel at the New York law firm Cooley, recalls saying at a conference last year. "And I still believe that's true."
Now who is Patrick Murck you might ask.
>https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickmurck
he is a lawyer that was really early on advocating for bitcoin and this Cooley he is working for is a really big law firm:
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooley_LLP
...that is also involved in the accord project (chainlink contributes to this project):
>https://www.accordproject.org/
>"...recalls saying at a conference last year."
so I digged around and the conference they talk about is Consensus 2016 and here this is what he said:
https://youtu.be/FsNQEQ5VSZc?t=1943
(it starts at 32:23, Murck is the guy in the middle)
>"so everybody who missed out on mining Bitcoin, Oracles are the new miners, like oracles is the new mining, thats actually going to be one of the easiest to attain like value add services in this whole ecosystem"
>"...its a huge business opportunity"