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Comment by feral | Hacker News Reader

No; using the Bitcoin blockchain to store medical records is a terrible idea.

Yes, they are robustly distributed on each of 5,000 worldwide nodes.

But, think about that! How's that going to work for 10 million patients' MRI records? Each MRI being a series of high res images?

That's not possible with Bitcoin - its not designed to store near that quantity of data - its not even desirable.

I don't know what the advantage of Blockchain is with healthcare, but its certainly not storing your medical records on the Bitcoin blockchain. [Standard disclaimers about predicting the future apply.]

Maybe a hash of them, so you know they aren't tampered with, or that sort of thing - but that seems like a second order problem.

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No one is advocating putting medical records on the blockchain. That's crazy.

He's talking about using a technology like Tierion or Chainpoint to anchor a hash of the data in the blockchain. This can be used to verify the integrity and approximate timestamp of the data.

http://tierion.com http://chainpoint.org

> No one is advocating putting medical records on the blockchain. That's crazy.

The post I responded to seemed to be.

It implied the data would be "distributed upon 5,000+ worldwide nodes in an immutable data ledger", and said it would:

"be there forever" "keep the data accurate and accessible"

I think its legit to call this out. Blockchain is a great technology, but its being hyped as if its the world's only distributed database.

> This can be used to verify the integrity and approximate timestamp of the data.

That may indeed be beneficial, but isn't the panacea that is being touted.

"That may indeed be beneficial, but isn't the panacea that is being touted."

We agree. That's the primary conclusion of the report.

Should have been more clear. No records should be stored on the Bitcoin blockchain, only a hash of the data. Using a service like Tierion, a hash of your data is anchored into the Bitcoin blockchain, and Tierion gives you back a blockchain receipt. That blockchain receipt is a cryptographic proof that can be used to verify the integrity of that data at a later point in time.

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