Is Crypto Innovative Technology? Really?

I would suggest, after many decades of watching “innovation” that we rethink what that means. My father built a computer in the mid/late 1950’s to automate aircraft landings for USAF. That was innovative and the use of the then-new transistors alongside good old vacuum tubes was also innovative.

Many of the great tech leaps forward came out of new technologies which themselves grew out of WWII, and for several decades the applications thereof dominated what we might justifiably call innovation. At the end of that process, the personal computer arose as a productivity tool, an innovative application of prior tech innovations. In parallel, miniaturization of storage and processing devices drove more such innovative applications.

Unseen all this time were other innovations, e.g. material science, medicine, molecular level engineering.

I think it is an overreach to call such things as crypto, “innovative.” In reality all it did was take the centuries old concept of an exchange, and create a mythical, formless “asset” to trade. Sort of a fraud really. Not innovation. Was Zoom for example innovative? Maybe, in one way. It was innovative to the extent that it applied other people’s inventions to amplify the vaunted conference call. Came on the scene, exploded, and saturated the market within half a generation.

As an investor I would separate true innovations from innovative applications. Very different

At one level, I admire Cathie Wood of Ark Invest and hope she succeeds. At many other levels, I believe crypto is a mythology and about as useful to long term investing as a plot of land in Middle Earth. She is one from the allegedly ‘Smart Money’ crowd that is perpetuating the mythology. Cynically, it seems the Smart Money is still promoting crypto in order to keep it propped up long enough for them to get out with their shirts.