Health Nexus and Trustless Systems
You don’t know me and I don’t know you, yet we live and breathe on the same planet at the same time. If you drive, as I do, we may even pass each other on the road as we go from place to place. I know I pass a great many people when I’m driving around, people I don’t know. And yet I trust them to operate heavy vehicles traveling at dangerous velocities just meters away from me? Do they trust me too, even though they don’t know me?
Not really.
Trustless Systems
Our system of self-directed road travel is made possible by a shared trust, but it’s not trust in anonymous drivers. There’s something more fundamental and reliable that undergirds this communal trust; we trust the system, and I don’t just mean we trust our local municipalities to filter out unsafe drivers.
Instinctively we understand that driving is a self-filtering activity. People that can’t drive safely either learn quickly or stop trying. That’s why new drivers are among the most dangerous drivers, not just because they are learning new skills, but also because the system hasn’t had enough time to filter them out. In time they will be tested, not just because we have driving instructors that test people prior to licencing, but because every trip in a car is a test, every stop, every turn, every choice: all pass-or-fail tests.
It’s not a perfect system but however imperfect the system is, that people are comfortable driving on roads alongside anonymous drivers demonstrates the value we place on trustless systems — systems that work consistently and predictably without regard to the individual choices or actions of others.
Trust-based Systems
I used that example because I think it’s something that’s very familiar to most people — even if not entirely obvious. The alternative, trust-based systems, or systems that only work when trusted parties choose to honor their agreements, are also familiar to most people.
In computer technology any centralized systems are trust-based. Take any social media platform as an example: you sign up, you create a profile, you gather followers, you build an online relationship with your followers. On that platform you are trusting them to relay your messages to your followers in an accurate and timely fashion.
You will likely be happy with the platform as long as you believe they are honoring their agreements. But here’s the thing, you have to trust them to do it. At any time they might decide to stop sending out your messages, or only send them out to some followers and not others, or only send them out a week later, or edit your content etc. You have to trust them.
But what if you didn’t? What if you could achieve the same goal — sending your message to your followers — without trusting an intermediary to relay it for you?
What we’re finding is given the choice people overwhelmingly prefer systems that require less trust.
Health Nexus
Blockchains, like Health Nexus, enable trustless computing systems: systems that work consistently and predictably without regard to the individual choices or actions of others. This is done through immutable smart-contracts stored on the blockchain.
To build a trustless system on Health Nexus you would:
- Program your smart contracts
- Have them audited for security and compliance by a reputable third party.
- Publish the audit results along with your unmodified source code.
- Deploy your smart contract to the Health Nexus blockchain.
- Provide proof your deployed contracts match your audited opensource code. (Anyone with the contract address and source code can do this for themselves)
Once deployed smart contract code can not be modified and will continue to operate as designed forever.
There are seemingly unlimited uses for trustless systems in healthcare. Checkout this article for practical systems that will bring value on Health Nexus. Once these systems become available will consumers and healthcare providers prefer them to existing trust-based systems? We think so.
Systems will evolve towards trustlessness as decentralized technology improves and our understanding of the application of it matures.
If you have questions about this, Health Nexus, or getting started find us in our telegram group. If you are interested in partnering with us to create dapps on Health Nexus or want to receive developer updates or training material please register your interest here.
About SimplyVital Health
SimplyVital Health is making decentralized technology accessible to the healthcare industry by creating Health Nexus, a healthcare-safe opensource blockchain.
