To understand why blockchain is important, look beyond wild speculation on what is built below.

The Internet bubble of the 1990s is generally considered a period of mad excess that ended with the destruction of hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth. What is less often discussed is how all the cheap capital of the boom years financed the infrastructure on which the most important Internet innovations would be built after the bubble burst. It financed the deployment of fibre optic cable, R&D on 3G networks and the construction of giant server arrays. All this would make possible the technologies that are now the foundation of the world's most powerful societies: algorithmic research, social media, mobile computing, cloud services, large data analysis, artificial intelligence, etc.

We believe that something similar is happening behind the wild volatility and media hype of the stratosphere of the crypto-currency and blockchain boom. The blockchain sceptics growled with joy...