Or you could have nobody bother to invest in things like this because of no reward, or they become closely guarded trade secrets of which the Elves keep and nobody else is even allowed to know they exist.
Or you could have nobody bother to invest in things like this because of no reward, or they become closely guarded trade secrets of which the Elves keep and nobody else is even allowed to know they exist.
"no reward" is weak, because of course you wouldn't make a wheel, say, unless you intended to roll somewhere.
You're basically saying "ASML's entire production line is worthless unless it is rare and coveted", which is .. obviously not true .. because of course the output is immensely useful.
The world needs more chipfabs, not less. A properly scaled chipfab in places like Broome or Santiago, or .. indeed in orbit .. would go a long way to sorting out the worlds fires.
The thing stopping us, is the international, imperial system of patents and intellectual 'property', which make nation states subservient to each other on the basis of ideas.
The ideas could be spreading far and wide, but we humans are keeping them in our cage, in which the only reward is having other cages to extract wealth from ..