8 ms·

Technology behind Bitcoin could aid science, report says

13 points by digital55 9y ago

westurner 9y ago
Bloom is working on non-academic credit building and scoring. Hyperledger brings together many great projects and tools which have numerous applications in science and industry. Is a blockchain necessary? Could we instead just sign JSONLD records with ld-signatures and store them in an eventually or strongly consistent database we all contribute resources to synchronizing and securing?
- ybrah 9y ago
  But how else are you going to hype an ICO with claims about the size of a market and get people who don't understand how blockchains work to give your their BTC/ETH?
- nrhk 9y ago
  That's just the centralization or decentralization question. We can do it all centralized already but we would also all need to trust whoever is hosting this data and trust every single person who has the ability to enter the data. Less nodes you need to trust the better, in a centralized solution where everyone can contribute you need to be able to trust everyone. In a decentralized system where everyone can contribute, you don't need to trust anyone but give up benefits of centralization such as speed, performance and usability.
  - arcticfox 9y ago
    > We can do it all centralized already but we would also all need to trust whoever is hosting this data and trust every single person who has the ability to enter the data. There are plenty of ways to minimize trust required with traditional cryptography though, this is not all or nothing, we have been doing this since PGP. You can get the overwhelming majority of the benefits with none of the drawbacks.
arcticfox 9y ago
I cannot imagine someone looking at the problems listed and coming up with a blockchain as the ideal solution. I'm with Mr. Himmelstein from the article, this proposal should be avoided. The last line is actually explicit that the whole thing is about desperately trying to find a nail for the blockchain hammer: > Digital Science is offering a $30 000 catalyst grant for an existing blockchain technology or a new idea that can be applied to academic publishing.
- kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
  Nothing wrong with a little technology push, we'll find out in due time if it's actually a good solution. What's 30k usd after all?
  - Dylan16807 9y ago
    A technology push is better than nothing, but constraining a system to blockchains for no technical reason is like constraining it to be written in perl. You're just making the job harder then it needs to be.
    - IanCal 9y ago
      Disclaimer: work for, but don't speak for, Digital Science. Am not involved in the grants. I'll try and add that as a boilerplate disclaimer on each comment, but to be very clear I am not speaking for DS at all. While I like DS (otherwise I'd work elsewhere), I'm very sceptical of blockchain things. I think this would be more valid as a criticism if it was the only grant available. DS run, typically, two per year which have no requirements like this. $30k is not nothing but it's also not a huge funding round (nor is it intended to be), it's a kick to get some ideas off the ground To be honest, I'd be surprised if you went to them with "this is not a blockchain but it solves the exact same problems of distributed trustless consensus with x y z, but more efficiently" and got a bad response. Sure, there's a lot of hype, but there's also not really that much actually built using the tech. Sounds like a fairly reasonable thing to give a bit of money to people to actually build things.
avian 9y ago
> Many academic publishers have had trouble finding a sustainable business model I would say they have trouble finding an ethical business model. Most big academic publishers are printing money. Reviewers, many times also editors are unpaid while the publishers rack in publication fees from authors and/or subscriptions from readers. I fail to see how blockchain solves this issue.
- IanCal 9y ago
  Disclaimer: work for Digital Science, don't speak for them, all my own thoughts, have started on my beer advent calendar, etc I think many publishers really are having trouble finding a sustainable long term business model. That doesn't mean many aren't making money now, but there is a complex and difficult transition happening. There's a huge push towards open access, and "preprints" (a concept I can never really understand in a time when they don't actually print things). What can be charged for, where are the margins and most complicated of all: how do they get there from here? Where should the payment come from to build and host the infrastructure, manage the data quality, do the admin, etc? What out of those should even be done any more? > I fail to see how blockchain solves this issue. There are at least a few things I can think of: * Registering an experiment, like a clinical trial * Registering results * Having some evidence you've registered a method and proposal before gathering the results, all data in the open * Register, in the open, facts or results tied to you for credit when they're used * More, since I'm not really working on this side of things. I do work with bibliographic data though and I'd love and append only log of publication data people pushed to. But then if everything was clear, it wouldn't be useful to offer a bit of money to gather ideas and try something out, would it? Worst case, the company loses some money but makes some contacts for people with interesting ideas in the field.

13 points by digital55 9y ago

Bloom is working on non-academic credit building and scoring. Hyperledger brings together many great projects and tools which have numerous applications in science and industry. Is a blockchain necessary? Could we instead just sign JSONLD records with ld-signatures and store them in an eventually or strongly consistent database we all contribute resources to synchronizing and securing?

ybrah 9y ago
But how else are you going to hype an ICO with claims about the size of a market and get people who don't understand how blockchains work to give your their BTC/ETH?
nrhk 9y ago
That's just the centralization or decentralization question. We can do it all centralized already but we would also all need to trust whoever is hosting this data and trust every single person who has the ability to enter the data. Less nodes you need to trust the better, in a centralized solution where everyone can contribute you need to be able to trust everyone. In a decentralized system where everyone can contribute, you don't need to trust anyone but give up benefits of centralization such as speed, performance and usability.
- arcticfox 9y ago
  > We can do it all centralized already but we would also all need to trust whoever is hosting this data and trust every single person who has the ability to enter the data. There are plenty of ways to minimize trust required with traditional cryptography though, this is not all or nothing, we have been doing this since PGP. You can get the overwhelming majority of the benefits with none of the drawbacks.

arcticfox 9y ago

I cannot imagine someone looking at the problems listed and coming up with a blockchain as the ideal solution. I'm with Mr. Himmelstein from the article, this proposal should be avoided. The last line is actually explicit that the whole thing is about desperately trying to find a nail for the blockchain hammer: > Digital Science is offering a $30 000 catalyst grant for an existing blockchain technology or a new idea that can be applied to academic publishing.

kaffeemitsahne 9y ago
Nothing wrong with a little technology push, we'll find out in due time if it's actually a good solution. What's 30k usd after all?
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  A technology push is better than nothing, but constraining a system to blockchains for no technical reason is like constraining it to be written in perl. You're just making the job harder then it needs to be.
  - IanCal 9y ago
    Disclaimer: work for, but don't speak for, Digital Science. Am not involved in the grants. I'll try and add that as a boilerplate disclaimer on each comment, but to be very clear I am not speaking for DS at all. While I like DS (otherwise I'd work elsewhere), I'm very sceptical of blockchain things. I think this would be more valid as a criticism if it was the only grant available. DS run, typically, two per year which have no requirements like this. $30k is not nothing but it's also not a huge funding round (nor is it intended to be), it's a kick to get some ideas off the ground To be honest, I'd be surprised if you went to them with "this is not a blockchain but it solves the exact same problems of distributed trustless consensus with x y z, but more efficiently" and got a bad response. Sure, there's a lot of hype, but there's also not really that much actually built using the tech. Sounds like a fairly reasonable thing to give a bit of money to people to actually build things.

avian 9y ago

> Many academic publishers have had trouble finding a sustainable business model I would say they have trouble finding an ethical business model. Most big academic publishers are printing money. Reviewers, many times also editors are unpaid while the publishers rack in publication fees from authors and/or subscriptions from readers. I fail to see how blockchain solves this issue.

IanCal 9y ago
Disclaimer: work for Digital Science, don't speak for them, all my own thoughts, have started on my beer advent calendar, etc I think many publishers really are having trouble finding a sustainable long term business model. That doesn't mean many aren't making money now, but there is a complex and difficult transition happening. There's a huge push towards open access, and "preprints" (a concept I can never really understand in a time when they don't actually print things). What can be charged for, where are the margins and most complicated of all: how do they get there from here? Where should the payment come from to build and host the infrastructure, manage the data quality, do the admin, etc? What out of those should even be done any more? > I fail to see how blockchain solves this issue. There are at least a few things I can think of: * Registering an experiment, like a clinical trial * Registering results * Having some evidence you've registered a method and proposal before gathering the results, all data in the open * Register, in the open, facts or results tied to you for credit when they're used * More, since I'm not really working on this side of things. I do work with bibliographic data though and I'd love and append only log of publication data people pushed to. But then if everything was clear, it wouldn't be useful to offer a bit of money to gather ideas and try something out, would it? Worst case, the company loses some money but makes some contacts for people with interesting ideas in the field.