Are you telling me that if I come up with a way to build a cold fusion reactor, start to finish, that is commercially viable but will cost me $1,000,000,000,000

Are you telling me that if I come up with a way to build a cold fusion reactor, start to finish, that is commercially viable but will cost me $1,000,000,000,000 to build but can power the entire human civilization, my only option is to either build it or forget it? That if I obtain a patent it is somehow my obligation to actually make the damn thing? I have no idea what he(?) is telling you, but I'm telling you YES. The problem here is that you couch it as coming up wit the whole thing from start to finish. Think instead of how many hundreds or THOUSANDS of patents might cover a commercially viable cold fusion reactor. Imagine if NONE of the patent holders want to invest a few billion to build it, they each wait around for some other sucker to invest a billion dollars and then try to "extract value" with their patent trolling lawsuits. Result? No cold fusion for humanity, because nobody wants to invest a billion dollars building something that requires permission from hundreds or thousands of venal "inventors." It is obvious that we do not need patents to protect the creation of a billion dollar reactor. The billion dollar cost to build one protects it. If you come up with the idea, but you don't have a billion dollars, do what everyone else is doing, go pitch it and raise money. If you don't have a billion dollars and you can't convince anyone else to give you a billion dollars, why should you get rich? There is no moral imperative to reward inventors for pure thinking, and furthermore there is NO evidence at the moment that patents serve as an incentive to get smart people like you to invent cold fusion instead of making money trading derivatives or playing professional poker.