Blockchain — solution to a problem or hammer without a nail?
Does your project really need blockchain? It’s a question we’re frequently asked. And one we often ask ourselves.
Our goal at Frankl is to make open science easy and rewarding for scientists. And blockchain technology provides simple and elegant answers to problems that scientists have been grappling with for some time.
But there are also ways to deliver our mission without the use of a distributed ledger. So fundamentally we don’t need the blockchain. Should non-blockchain approaches provide a better solution for a particular problem, we’ll happily take that path.
And that’s the key. We’re not blockchain evangelists. We’re focused on problems, looking for pragmatic solutions.
On Monday evening, Elise and I attended the Australian Healthcare and Blockchain Meetup in Sydney. We’ve been to a lot of meetups recently but this was particularly relevant for us. The problems facing healthcare and medical research are in many ways similar to those facing cognitive assessment — the initial focus of the Frankl project.
To give one example, progress in both fields depends on solving a particularly gnarly problem — how do we easily and securely share data about individual human beings in a way that doesn’t violate their privacy?
Solving this problem will help clinicians, educators, physios, social workers, occupational therapists, work together with a particular patient or client, join the dots, and understand that individual’s history and needs. And it will allow scientists to work together so they can better understand the conditions they’re interested in and figure out which treatments and interventions work best.
Mark Toohey, the first speaker at the meetup, described blockchain as essentially a tool for sharing and collaboration. “It’s not a cure all,” he acknowledged. “It’s a new way to store data. It does some things better and other things worse.”
Mark is an expert in cryptocurrency law. Having survived throat cancer thanks to chemotherapy, he quit his law practice to start up a blockchain company TBSx3 (To be sure, to be sure, to be sure) attempting to solve the problem of counterfeit medicine.
TBSx3 takes advantage of a feature of blockchain — “no double spend” — without which cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum wouldn’t work.
“Blockchain is not a cure all. It’s a new way to store data. It does some things better and other things worse.”
The idea is that each individual medical item (e.g., a tamper-proof bottle of pills) is marked with a unique alphanumeric ID that can be tracked through the supply chain. Once an ID has passed a stage in the supply chain it can’t be “resold”. This makes counterfeiting a futile exercise. You can still make thousands of fake copies of a genuine item — but now you can only sell one of them!
They key here is the immutability of the blockchain. There’s no way of deleting the transaction record and selling more identical items.
Vaibhav Namburi, the evening’s second speaker, made a similar point. He introduced the acronym CRUD — Create Read Update Delete — to describe traditional data management. Blockchain is CRU. There’s no delete.
Vaibhav is a blockchain developer and most of his presentation was spent introducing blockchain concepts and terminology to an eclectic audience. But in doing so he mentioned several interesting projects that make use of blockchain’s immutability to verify, for instance, university degrees, HR records, and used cars.
That last example brought to mind a paper published last year by Simine Vazire, a psychologist at University of California Davis, in which she compared science to used car sales. Entitled Quality Uncertainty Erodes Trust in Science, it’s the most intuitive and articulate exposition of open science I’ve come across.
As Vazire points out, a used car may look shiny and well-maintained in the showroom, but the unsuspecting buyer has no way of knowing whether or not it’s a lemon that will fall apart two kilometres down the road. In a similar way, she argues, anyone reading an article in a scientific journal is getting the shiny, polished version of the study with little sense of what’s “under the hood”.
“Without high levels of transparency in scientific publications, consumers of scientific manuscripts are in a similar position as buyers of used cars — they cannot reliably tell the difference between lemons and high quality findings.”
Open science is about making the “supply chain” — from study design to data collection to peer review to publication — as open and transparent as possible. It’s about taking the trust out of the scientific process and opening it up to scrutiny and collaboration.
Blockchain solutions to these problems already exist. The wheel doesn’t need a huge amount of reinventing.
But do we need blockchain? Are there better, simpler, or cheaper solutions that don’t involve blockchain? That’s the question we’ll be asking for each issue we encounter — fitting the solution to the problem and not the other way around.
Frankl Open Science
At Frankl, our mission is to make open science easy and rewarding.
If you’d like to know more, you can read our whitepaper, check out our website, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter @FranklOpenSci.
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