At the beginning of the Second World War it was still an impoverished agrarian country. I personally don’t consider that a very long time.

This opinion is due to the longer tenure as tech “hub” of various places in the UK, France, and USA.

There is some great tech coming out of Switzerland but I’m not sure there’s a really a connection between hosting standards organizations and having a technical infrastructure.

There was blockchain hype, but it was mainly among young adults. Those of us who are older have been through enough hype cycles to know that the tech is only as good as the people running it, and "a shadowy cabal of exchange owners whose names we don't know" is honestly way worse than "a shadowy cabal of publicly traded banks".