> The real winner of a gold rush are the people selling pickaxes.

No I'm pretty sure the people who hoarded gold (coins) have made more money from blockchain than IBM and AWS.

You'd think so, but Pickaxe coins like the graph have significantly less gains than dog meme coins. I actually think a sure sign of when a coin won't go mega is when it tries to do something practical, since then its obvious its not that great a practical utility after all (as almost nothing is on a blockchain, except gambling).

Nvidia is getting nice profits, and with way less risk than those “investing” in crypto

The only problem is that especially these ppl will probably not sell until it's too late.

With cryptocurrencies, the pickaxes are GPUs and ASICs. I doubt this is a serious revenue generator for AWS because of how few things actually need and use blockchains. It's mostly there so consultants can sell blockchain solutions to companies desperate for a blockchain strategy.

Out of whatever cases may exist for what you're describing (re: desperation, etc.), do they almost always involve someone getting conned?

Microsoft is apparently shutting down its blockchain service, though: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/blockchain/service/mi...

So much for selling pickaxes...