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danghica | 6 years ago

Why not a government regulated database?

discuss

order

JohnJamesRambo|6 years ago

Because centralized databases are prone to manipulation and censorship?

nosianu|6 years ago

So you also need to get rid of drug databases, PubMed, protein databases, etc.

This makes no sense. If your government is in such bad shape you have far bigger problems than keeping track of drug trials.

"Blockchain" just stores the same stuff lots and lots of times in as many places as possible. Extremely wasteful and expensive, with all the overhead of doing that (and updating hat "database"), plus the consensus algorithm which may or may not be reliable/crackable.

Is it a sign of the times, and maybe in some countries more than in others, that there is a hype around mistrust? Trying to build a world where trust is not necessary? I bet that won't work. I think you need to fix the trust issue more directly, working around the trust requirement won't work. It just creates huge complexity and even more points of failure. Especially since you would have to go "all in": What's the point in taking just one thing into the trust-free solution? All those things depend on one another, you would have to do it with all or most of them to get the benefit you are looking for. It may look manageable if you only look at one particular thing, but imagine everything had to be stored in such a way, the incredible effort required, and the more distribution there is the harder it is to understand what's going on.

You really think storing all kinds of data in as many places as possible and then trusting an algorithm to sort it all out, the "truth", works better than trust in a credible entity? At scale (in more than one dimension)?

ska|6 years ago

For the current clinical trial mechanism to work at all, you are relying on a deep level of trust and professionalism. If you don't have that, you're going to have to imagine a radical, nearly complete transformation of how this sort of science is being done. If you do have that, I don't see what tracking a small piece of it with a blockchain really buys you.

Do you?

carbocation|6 years ago

This is my current view, too.

There is no "double spend" possibility. There is necessarily a trusted source. Why not get the benefit of that centralized source and have the government host a plain database?