At CoinDesk’s Consensus 2018 conference this year, Joseph Lubin, founder of Ethereum company Consensys, agreed to wager “any amount of bitcoin” with Jimmy Song of Blockchain Capital that within five years, the blockchain would have a number of working applications serving real users.

That’s probably a bet worth taking. Hundreds of millions of dollars have already been invested by some of the world’s biggest companies on the future of the blockchain.

The blockchain is ideal for keeping track of a currency and protecting it against fraud. We don’t yet know what else it’s good for. Until developers have finished their work, we won’t know whether it will become the underlying technology behind a rejuvenated sharing economy or whether it will only power banking services, making transactions cheap and almost instantaneous.

The blockchain has already underpinned a new currency. Investors are now betting that it can do something else, and they’re placing their bets on a bunch of new technologies. Most of those new technologies will fail. But some, a few, will succeed.