Yeah. And it goes beyond solution-in-search-of-problem; money clearly makes things worse here. Finding great solutions might sometimes need thinking outside o

Yeah. And it goes beyond solution-in-search-of-problem; money clearly makes things worse here. Finding great solutions might sometimes need thinking outside of the box; I can see solutions in search of problems as being that kind of long shot that's rarely but sometimes spectacularly useful. But crypto is particularly tricky for that, because it's not just a solution in search of a problem; it's also a Ponzi scheme. And it's really hard to disentangle the two. Were "crypto" merely a bunch of clever algorithms allowing an ever broader set of zero-knowledge proofs... then perhaps we'd find actually useful problems to solve with that. But instead, it's already a huge market by virtue of its artificial scarcity. Any new cool thing these algorithms might do is overshadowed by the lure of the Ponzi scheme; even a tiny probability of turning that pyramid into something solid is easily worth more than a long-shot at some revolutionary technology you probably couldn't even control if you did think it up. It's the combination of so much money that drowns out everything else with a dash of gambling, a sprinkling of a pyramid scheme, all lathered onto a solution in search of a problem that makes it particularly dispiriting.