That is, hes talking about an industry with crystal clear commercial applications If its hard to reward innovation there, imagine trying to fund antifragile tinkering in cryptography (i.e. the innovations from the 70s and 80s that Bitcoin used).

I should confidently tell you about the new world were building with my organization, Planck, and how it will change everything.

I should show charts, letting you behold the enormous addressable markets that we will conquer.

And to make matters worse, Im trained as an academic.

I must ask, then, that you mentally append some awful clause lets go with according to some, it might be possible that to every sentence in the whole article.

Thanks in advance.) But its true: as far as economists can tell, the addressable market for innovation itself is perfectly equal to economic growth (per person).

This is all the wealth that gets created in the world and its somewhere around 5 trillion dollars a year, all due to innovation.

New ideas, new knowledge, and new ways of doing things what economist Paul Romer calls new recipes.

As a result, any project working on incentives for innovation itself has this trillion dollar monstrosity as its market.

And yet when I say that Planck is trying to help scale scientific innovation, you probably dont think about a trillion dollar market.

But science is just a decentralized protocol for innovation it structures and rewards shared knowledge.

And so if blockchain is going to transform innovation, massively scaled open science is probably what it will look like.

This has already been unbelievably valuable imagine if you had to pay a physics tax, or if you had to sum up the wealth that Alan Turing created in the world.

The Industrial Revolution, that historical explosion of wealth we saw in the graph earlier, was a radical shift to open innovation.

As economic historian Deirdre McCloskey puts is, what made our world astonishingly rich in this period is that: Poor people such as the blacksmith John Harrison (marine chronometer) or the son of a weaver John Dalton (atomic theory, among other ideas) or the seamstress Coco Chanel (business attire for women) were permitted for the first time in history to innovate.

But today, growth is slowing among countries at the technological frontier.

Have we really maxed out innovation, as some economists think Are there great ideas left to find How do we reward innovation today Or: the problem with planting crops is worth nothing; only harvesting matters There is a reason why venture capitalists say Ideas are Worth Nothing; Only Execution Matters.

But its also true in a very deep sense: a shared idea cant be protected.

In Elinor Ostroms terms, a shared resource that you cant protect is a non-excludable public good.

And this inability to protect valuable, scarce resources produces the infamous tragedy of the commons.

Its absolutely true then that, conditional on telling the world your ideas, ideas are usually worth nothing.

The fact is, VCs and Angel Investors focus on execution because the marketplace for ideas has very, very poor economics.

Just how bad are the economics for new ideas Peter Thiel (w Blake Masters) gives an example: In the 1980s you could build a better disk drive than anybody else, you could take over the whole world and two years later someone else would come along and replace yours.

This had a great benefit to consumers, but it didnt actually help the people who started these companies.

Crypto Antifragil Richard Rytenband