“but why?”
$$$$
Ever heard of ‘crowd funding’?
I had to look up crowd funding. Yes, it’s possible.
I looked for Cravens’ CV and haven’t found it but I didn’t have much time. All I’ve read is that he is a research scientist so this wouldn’t be the first time someone cooked the books to get funding. The demo was at an NI conference and I would hope there were people skeptical enough to look into the demo and see if there were any shenanigans and haven’t read of any.
I’m a 1/3 of the way through the book Excess Heat and I’m surprised at some of the things I’ve read that I never heard of. Since I have a ways to go I’m not going to comment any more except that it is very interesting and again, there’s a lot of things I never heard of happening in it.