Money and Innovation: Riding the Wave of Ideas... But Do You Add VALUE?

It's Great to Have a Great Idea, BUT...

New industries — think mobile communications, the Internet, cryptocurrencies — always seem to go through their share of growing pains.

One of the most frequent pains (in everyone's ass, mostly!) can be the large number of carpetbaggers and opportunists who see the new trend not so much as a chance to build something amazing at the ground level to become multi-millionaires... but as an opportunity to (largely) extract "money for nothing" from the emerging technology.

Often without having anything to offer, aside from flimsy ideas and empty promises.

Maybe that's a bit harsh, because often it is not so much directly malicious intent that's at play for these people, as it is the alluring idea that you can just "cook up some scheme" and people will throw money at you, regardless. It's not really stealing or scamming, so much as the lure of easy money.

Back in the 1990's people raised insane amounts of money by simply having an idea, coming up with a company name and then adding "dot com" to it. Of course, in the real world of day-to-day operations, that's never enough to sustain an actual business in the long run.

Anyone remember eToys? In most cases, the extent to which anyone remembers them amounts to "they were NOT Toys-r-Us." Makes about as much sense as starting a WalMart clone named LoftMart and thinking that'll actually become something.

Chances are you've never heard of a venture called "Flooz" These people had the idea of creating their own "online currency" that people could then use to buy stuff from participating retailers. WTF, over??? They actually raised $35 million and then went bankrupt.

Most of the time, the losers in the equation are the investors and supporters, not the actual idea creators who managed to score a yacht, an executive jet and a beachfront mansion in Costa Rica on the deal.

Sound familiar, when you consider cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology?

I got to thinking about these things today, as I started looking at the more than five thousand cryptocurrencies tracked by the Coinmarketcap web site.

Who the hell actually needs that many tokens? Granted, a great many of them are pretty worthless... but a great many of them had valuations in the tens of millions of dollars in late 2017.

It's funny how people are often more drawn to unproven concepts than they are to proven things that actually work. Which — I suppose — is why in the investing world, buying a high flying biotech stock is far more "romantic" than buying stock in a basic materials company that has had steady profits for fifty years.

All makes me wonder what the Cryptocurrency field will evolve into. What do YOU think?

Thanks for reading!

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(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for this platform.) Created at 20200214 01:02 PST 1198

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