[wpietri]

Sure. But for it not to be a waste, they really do have to learn something. What hypotheses are they testing? What can this project tell us that we can't learn from the history of decentralized efforts?

I'm not saying that there isn't anything. Just that new efforts should be making new mistakes.

(Also, the reason to use investment lingo is that investment is the field that specializes in examining cost-benefit tradeoffs for resource usage that hopefully leads to human benefit.)