Reply To: TriAlpha achieves another huge round of investment in "stealth" mode – What's up with that?!

[JShell]

Hmm, this is a conundrum. I would say that the current “open” format benefits from open-source-type benefits and it fits with Eric’s overall vision of altruism for the project, but it also means that potential investors might take the project less seriously at this point . . . I agree that people (wealthy people especially?) like to see a well-presented idea, even if the physics behind it isn’t so solid . . regardless of the situation now, at some point, even if the project is successful in proving break-even or net energy generation, it will probably still need to do some serious engineering and production logistics to come up with a marketable final product. If LPP goes to market scale, it might be hard for it to remain open in the way it has been in the research stages. But others would know more about this than I do now.

Although caution is wise regarding Big Oil’s (strong) desire to see this fail, I think the fear-based concern should be pretty minor. As long as LPP doesn’t sign away its decisionmaking power to anyone, and it has good coverage of all relevant patents, idea burying shouldn’t be an issue. Who knows, maybe one of the Big Oil companies would want to hedge its bets by investing once the theory is proven? They do have tons of cash on hand, without tons more wells to drill, aside from the tar sands in Canada.

Also, a related question might be what LPP would look like if it was trying to do sales of the focus fusion as an energy generation device . . . or to do sales of licenses for other companies to build and sell the devices-