Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea

davidgerard.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 154 posts

Re: Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea

#61

Post by darawk »

davidgerard wrote: post #22
Uptrenda wrote: post #15

I feel its become very fashionable to dismiss the simpler applications of the tech because of how unrealistically its been applied. It's so easy to do too. Look at the insane valuations, the fraud, and hype cooked up by marketers, and the whole thing looks very stupid. But its a mistake to let this get in the way of critical thinking. There is a reason why the topic is brought up so often and its because among all th…

The obviously convincing argument would be - after ten years - "something to show for it all." That is, something that blockchain is clearly and obviously the use case for. "Potential" goes only so far. Eventually you need kinetic.

Programmable money is not a thing to show?

Re: Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea

#62

Post by WalterSear »

chris_wot wrote: post #44
Uptrenda wrote: post #15

I feel its become very fashionable to dismiss the simpler applications of the tech because of how unrealistically its been applied. It's so easy to do too. Look at the insane valuations, the fraud, and hype cooked up by marketers, and the whole thing looks very stupid. But its a mistake to let this get in the way of critical thinking. There is a reason why the topic is brought up so often and its because among all th…

If you could tell me even one application of this technology outside of cryptocurrency, I'd genuinely be interested.

* Decentralized, anonymized reputation management. Imagine an ebay score that couldn't be owned by ebay, or any another company.

* Decentralized digital Asset ownership verification. Again, imagine facebook without a facebook. Or imagine purchase a music or software token that you could use on any provider, and never expired. Sign up for a new streaming service and take all your songs/videos/games with you from the old one.

* All the legal structures of a company, purchased off the shelf, handling all the vagaries of human resources and accounting, but without managers or payroll accountants. Just remote teammates, who may never have worked before, but know they will get paid a salary, receive evaluations and promotions from their peers.

These are just toy examples, I'm sure if I took more than a few seconds, I could give you much better ones. The problem with blockchain isn't finding applications - it's finding monetizable ones.

All the examples above would make amazing open source projects, but IMHO would be very difficult to generate revenue without compromising their decentralized nature, by inserting oneself into the transactions to take a cut. Centralized control of an application is almost a requirement for monetization, and, blockchains, are, by definition, intended to circumvent centralization.

Moreover, trust and verification aren't new problems, and we already have plenty of centralized solutions for these problems. So, blockchain applications both have to be better than what was there before, and work around the decentralized nature of the system.

Consequently, people trying to make a living on the blockchain mostly resort to monetizing the networks themselves - in other words, developing cryptocurrency-like products of some form. Is this decentralized? Not entirely, but it's less centralized than what came before. If people disagree with the behaviour oof the ethereum foundation, they can fork the currency. However, this still a long cry from actual decentralization. It is certainly an open question what value 'kindof-sortof' decentralized networks provide.

Re: Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea

#63

Post by AmericanChopper »

smt88 wrote: post #43
tracker1 wrote: post #36

I cringe every single time someone suggests blockchain in our space. Either it's easier with other tech (even public/private key tech doesn't require blockchain), or open to potential leaks/abuse in the future (tracking how everyone voted). There are a lot of use cases, most even, where it's not a great fit, and there are other, better, approaches. Disclosure, I work for an election services company...

I've discovered that some people say "blockchain" when they mean "immutable, distributed, cryptographically-verified database" -- which is actually a useful thing for many people. The Byzantine fault tolerance, public consensus, and mining aspects that we associate with "true" blockchains are the parts that people can't find a way to justify and can typically be ignored.

But fault tolerance, consensus or mining are not a necessary part of blockchain either.

Re: Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea

#64

Post by perl4ever »

pvaldes wrote: post #6
sctb wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please try to be less rude and also tell us something we can learn from? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Visually looks a little messed up. Could be improved IMHO paying attention to some standard typographic rules. Do not use a mix of several fonts and sizes in the same article Choose good fonts. I wonder why is so trendy nowadays to use the thinnest font available and put it in an low contrast gray tone. It puts a innecessary strain in the eye of your public Cheap fonts have a badly designed character spacing. The sam…

"I wonder why is so trendy nowadays to use the thinnest font available"

I am pretty much an amateur at making web pages, and after I used Garamond for something, I read an article about how terrible it is for the WWW because it's so thin and you should only use it for print. But I thought, hey, my phone has more resolution than early laser printers, so is this advice really still relevant?

Re: Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea

#65

Post by baby »

bigiain wrote: post #49
smt88 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've discovered that some people say "blockchain" when they mean "immutable, distributed, cryptographically-verified database" -- which is actually a useful thing for many people. The Byzantine fault tolerance, public consensus, and mining aspects that we associate with "true" blockchains are the parts that people can't find a way to justify and can typically be ignored.

So they _really_ mean git.

Right. When the biggest advances in blockchain are really in consensus.

Re: Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea

#66

Post by twohearted »

smt88 wrote: post #43
tracker1 wrote: post #36

I cringe every single time someone suggests blockchain in our space. Either it's easier with other tech (even public/private key tech doesn't require blockchain), or open to potential leaks/abuse in the future (tracking how everyone voted). There are a lot of use cases, most even, where it's not a great fit, and there are other, better, approaches. Disclosure, I work for an election services company...

I've discovered that some people say "blockchain" when they mean "immutable, distributed, cryptographically-verified database" -- which is actually a useful thing for many people. The Byzantine fault tolerance, public consensus, and mining aspects that we associate with "true" blockchains are the parts that people can't find a way to justify and can typically be ignored.

Without those other "negligible" aspects there is no incentive for anyone to run nodes to validate the chain. There is no blockchain. It's those very things that allow these systems to function.

Re: Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea

#67

Post by woah »

Never have I seen someone so angry that a college student gave a vague talk, a startup made some exaggerated claims, and a university research project wasn’t completed.

I hope he doesn’t read hacker news. The vague talks, exaggerated claims, and unfinished research projects here would give him an aneurism!

Re: Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea

#68

Post by acdha »

darawk wrote: post #58
acdha wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It requires education, and R & D to unlock most of it. But at some point we'll have straight-forward tools that can be applied to solve a variety of common problems. We’ve been hearing this for a decade – it’ll change the world, if you don’t agree it’s because you don’t understand it well enough – and yet we don’t have a single example of it being competitive, much less compelling. One of the common comparisons is…

You think that dis-intermediating banks for electronic funds transfer is not an application?

Okay, let’s see: how does that benefit me in real, tangible terms? What risks does it have - for example, do users take on responsibility for fraud risk?

Re: Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea

#69

Post by mhluongo »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #63
smt88 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've discovered that some people say "blockchain" when they mean "immutable, distributed, cryptographically-verified database" -- which is actually a useful thing for many people. The Byzantine fault tolerance, public consensus, and mining aspects that we associate with "true" blockchains are the parts that people can't find a way to justify and can typically be ignored.

But fault tolerance, consensus or mining are not a necessary part of blockchain either.

Consensus certainly is.

Re: Medical records on the blockchain – the history of a bad idea

#70

Post by Avshalom »

darawk wrote: post #58
acdha wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It requires education, and R & D to unlock most of it. But at some point we'll have straight-forward tools that can be applied to solve a variety of common problems. We’ve been hearing this for a decade – it’ll change the world, if you don’t agree it’s because you don’t understand it well enough – and yet we don’t have a single example of it being competitive, much less compelling. One of the common comparisons is…

You think that dis-intermediating banks for electronic funds transfer is not an application?

unless you can spend the bitcoin, raw, then you now have two intermediaries: the currency-bitcoin on your end and the bitcoin-currency on the other end.
Post reply on HN