Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

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All of this is hype. Blockchain is only useful when you bolt a speculative asset on top because otherwise, who the heck will pay for the miners to make it work? If your answer is "the people using it will", that means there is already enough trust in the system to just use a Real Database....

And even if you manage to solve that problem, the blockchain still doesn't help with medical records, authenticity or anything else. You still have to trust the people entering those records. you still have to trust that the person who said "those pills are authentic" on the blockchain.

Smart contracts are also the biggest pile of hype. You can't have "code is law" because other wise you wind up with The DAO.... All code has bugs. All code has corner cases where assumptions fall apart. You can't code law.

Blockchain is pure, 100% hype. Almost every single use case falls apart under even a small amount of scrutiny. The only use the blockchain serves is as a platform for fraud. If you are a scammer, there is no better place to be than in crypto.

FFS.

It's turtles all the way down, right?

None of my proposed use cases rely on PoW, bitcoin.

Perhaps I should have said it more clearly: I'm not interested in currency et al, because best as I can tell, bitcoin is just a better escrow, or worse a collectable (like baseball cards). And those things don't interest me.

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Have you done accounting, bookkeeping, auditing? Another way to think about blockchains is an interoperable ledger. If your data doesn't leave your org, you can just using tamper evident logs (rolling hashes), no consensus stuff required.

I worked on election integrity issues for a decade. I'm the biggest technoskeptic. I pretty much oppose all things new until they're battle proven.

The biggest challenge for election administration is verifying and publishing the physical chain of custody of all the gear and materials. And no matter how hard you try, there's always some yahoos (flat earther types) that will demand ever greater proof.

Whaddya gonna do?

Well, based on my experience, applying some blockchain technologies to document and publish chain of custody would simplify A LOT of the public accountability and transparency issues.

At the end of the day, it's just double ledger accounting. Debits match credits. The parts of blockchain that interest me make it easier to "show your work".

What you're describing are hashchains and logs that predate Bitcoin. They're useful. They might even be part of the solution to the problems you were talking about. Here's some old ones just to illustrate that people have been on the topic for a while.

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ahae/papers/peerreview-tr2.pdf

https://eprint.iacr.org/2005/002.pdf

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.625...

And here's you a blockchain-based solution to medical sharing since you said you were looking into such things.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7990130

Thank you.

Those papers are from about the same time frame, but I don't immediately recognize them. I do remember the implementation I modeled mine after was patent encumbered.

I may have adopted "tamper evident logging" because I was talking to a lot of non-geeks at the time and they were familiar with terms like "tamper evident seals".

That MeDShare paper is kinda weird. We were very fortunate to have domain experts (nurses, doctors, admins) on staff. So what we ended up with (after a few years) didn't look much like what MeDShare proposes. For example, access control is a non-starter, because in an emergency no one cares about permission. So the best we could do is log access. Also, demographic data at rest is plaintext, because in the USA there's no GUID, so you need access to all the fields to do record matching (linking) and mitigate poor data quality.

Repeating myself: my interest in tamper evident logging was for legal liability and improving our own QA/test.

I haven't thought much about all the other areas blockchains could be used in medicine, like prescriptions.

PS- My default position is that smart contracts are a malware vector.

But if there's some meat on those bones, I wanna know about it. I think of it as a constraints satisfaction problem. If the "vocabulary" can be kept simple enough, where our current theorem provers are sufficient, that could be cool.

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