As someone who is a CEO of a medical blockchain startup which is trying to find actual meaningful use cases, I agree 100% with the conclusions of this post.
(finding actual convincing use cases in the medical space for this tech is hard)
(finding actual convincing use cases in the medical space for this tech is hard)
But seriously, isn't this putting the cart before the horse? The usual order is "find a problem, build a solution", not "find a technology, build a solution, work out who has a problem it can solve". How's that working out for you?
We should consider the following:
A startup can have a product offering and also be the product itself.
I struggle to think of a use case for this in healthcare.
Sadly, I feel like this could be used to describe most applications of "blockchain technology".
Well, there is a whole industry of universities of finding a technology and then licensing it out or spinning a company off to do something with it. It may be that it's very hard to do if you don't have all the things a university does going for it, but it does work in some cases.
Another way to look at it is to consider that if a technology excels at offering capabilities in a certain domain, and a certain industry is known to require capabilities in a certain domain, if there is a good fit for it, it will probably eventually be deployed there. But if you can be first, there's likely money to be made. In that respect, I imagine a "CEO of a medical blockchain startup which is trying to find actual meaningful use cases" is really just someone (or a small group of people) doing intensive research to try to locate the match if it exists and be the first to provide it. A gamble, but one okay odds given the potential payoff.
Kinda sorta, but that's a difference in kind.
Most university research tends to be "basic research", meaning that it tends to be focused on understanding how things work rather than developing anything that is immediately useful.
In the course of doing that, sometimes something immediately useful is developed -- but that's not the most common case.
This sort of research is not "finding a solution, then looking for a problem to solve". It's simply trying to figure out how our world works.
That depends on who you mean by "they". The researchers themselves generally don't give this any thought. The university administration, however, is always hoping for additional revenue streams.
It's a slow process, for exactly the reasons you describe- in fact, I've quoted that exact same line of reasoning many times myself.
The reason to work in this area regardless is because there are definitely large opportunities long term.
If you don't mind me being more nosy, are the long-term opportunities in this exact line of business? (i.e. do you think that one day medical records will be routinely stored on a blockchain?) or is it more than developing skills and capability with both blockchain and health tech will be valuable in the future?
I find the private blockchain technologies (Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Sawtooth) superior for these types of applications especially since Fabric implemented private data.
Also is good for supply chain tracking.
But I understand why people avoid the blockchain space altogether. There was so many bad projects that were not suitable for the tech when all the hype was going on. Not to mention all the cryptocurrency scams. Fortunately a lot of the private blockchain tech has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.