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Comment by kysar_tom | Hacker News Reader

Tierion anchors the root of a Merkle Tree made up of all inbound records every 10 minutes into a Bitcoin transaction. With that root in a Bitcoin transaction, you can use a portable cryptographic proof (Tierion calls them blockchain receipts) to validate the integrity of each record at a later point in time.

The Bitcoin blockchain is a global immutable data ledger that makes for a great place to anchor hashes to.

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Okay, that is not blockchains for healthcare, that is third party validation for hashing. You're just storing the validation in Bitcoin's public network instead of your own secure servers. There are problems with this:

- You can't guarantee which block the transaction is on [1], which means all your customer encryption is asynchronous (slow).

- Your customers are assuming that you're keeping your private keys safe, which is not any different than trusting a non-bitcoin verification provider.

- The first quantum computer is going to destroy ECDSA, meaning your private keys will be reversed and every health product depending on your service will be trustless. Merkle trees can theoretically be used in a post-quantum world [2], but the method by which you're generating the root for the tree is not safe because you're relying on a network you don't control (Bitcoin).

How is this competitively good for healthcare?

[1] http://www.ibtimes.com/bitcoins-big-problem-transaction-dela...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography#Hash...

As per [0], cryptography standards such as ECRYPT II tend to say that Bitcoin's 256-bit ECDSA keys are secure until at least 2030-2040.

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Quantum_computing_and_Bitcoin

Just because the bitcoin wiki says it, doesn't make it a good prediction. Experts also used to say that a computer couldn't beat a Go Grandmaster until 2030.

The other points are still problems of using bitcoin right now.

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