James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: For the essentially zero risk of putting in escrow one third of the price > of a 1MW system -- information worth billions of dollars in futures markets > alone at essentially zero cost by taking Rossi up on his offer of allowing > your techs full access to run whatever tests they desire. Why, with all > the virtually hysterical investment in quant finance, hasn't there been a > stampede to exploit this offering of essentially free money? >
Three things come to mind: 1. I suspect he has been turning down offers like this, from people he thinks are only interested in getting access to the data. I would turn them down, if I were him. 2. Who knows how many orders he has taken? It could be dozen. Or 100. . . . Maybe what you are describing is happening behind the scenes. 3. Read about the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1850s and early 60s, when T. D. Judah was trying to raise money for it. You can seldom get wealthy people to invest in a risky venture or a radically new idea, even when a few years later everyone can see it is best investment in history. Judah was asking for investments from the wealthiest people on earth: San Francisco gold and silver moguls. These people regularly gambled up to $100,000 a night ($2.5 million in 2012 dollars.) Judah managed to sell only $200 in shares, and only $20 was ever paid in. Here is a description from the book "A Great & Shining Road" by J. H. Williams, QUOTE: Despite the ostentatious wealth of San Francisco and the large and varied investments of its denizens, as future investor Mark Hopkins remembered, only one sale of two hundred-dollar shares "was ever subscribed in San Francisco and $20 all that was paid in -- although the company had an office there." An itinerant Frenchman bought the two shares, but he wandered off in search of his destiny, never paid the balance, and his shares were later forfeited to the company. In a city brimful of buccaneer businessmen, Judah's stock certificates failed dismally, and he was deeply shaken. He had not reckoned on conservatism from such financial sharks as Darius Ogden Mills, a Croesus-rich banker soon to create the mammoth Bank of California and buy virtual control of the huge Comstock Lode. The skepticism of the business community was as nothing, however, compared with the outright hostility of the various interests that stood to lose from a successful Pacific Railroad. Shipping companies -- Wells, Fargo and other stage and freight companies, and rival railroaders -- all fought the Central Pacific from its inception. While one observer has correctly noted that "the project was thoroughly saturated and fairly dripping with the elements of adventure and romance," these were not attractive elements to West Coast financiers. Although somewhat naively Judah did not anticipate genuine opposition, he perhaps should have realized that it was a fact of West Coast economic life that the best local investments, with high and immediate returns (of up to 2 percent a month) were in mining, an industry that was still expanding dizzily. Still, the fact that not a single San Francisco businessman took his (admittedly long-range) plan seriously all but destroyed him. END QUOTE If, someday, it is revealed that Wells Fargo is still at it, fighting to prevent cold fusion, that will not surprise me. That is what large, wealthy, entrenched organizations do. They preserve the status quo. They prevent progress, except for predictable, incremental progress under their control. The Railroad took off when Lincoln decided to let Uncle Sam assume the risks, and fork over the capital. Uncle Sam offered gigantic loans to build the road. Uncle got all the money back with interest, by the way. The Big Four in California -- Huntington, Stanford, Crocker and Hopkins -- put the money to work immediately where it would do the most good. They bribed members of Congress with at least $20 million to grease the wheels and keep the project funded. (That's $290 million today.) The exact amount is not known because when the project was finished, they took their corporate accounting books outside and burned them. This will probably be necessary for cold fusion. We will have to buy many politicians. It is a small price to pay. - Jed
