[pavlov]

Right! There was widespread public enthusiasm about engines in the latter half of the 19th century. Both John Keely and Karl Benz created engine startups, among hundreds of others around the world. Keely ripped off gullible investors for decades with faked demos, while Benz's company is still going strong.

But if we're going to make the analogy to the present day, it's important to frame it right. Blockchains are just a subset of distributed databases, and the lasting "Benzes" of the field might be projects like FoundationDB rather than blockchain-anything.

[tfha]

Internal combustion engines didn't have research papers explaining why they were impossible.