I recognize many of your thoughts and observations (but not your achievements) as my own, and agree on most points. A corollary you do not make explicit: the u

I recognize many of your thoughts and observations (but not your achievements) as my own, and agree on most points. A corollary you do not make explicit: the university is to students/diplomes as the prestigious publisher is to papers. The student/researcher is expected to pay tuition and self-educate, and make an intellectual contribution (thesis in case of university or paper in case of publisher), for which if you pay the right price (enough years of tuition as a student, or underpaid labour as a PhD in case of university or the review and editing etc costs for a publisher) they are willing to issue a paper branded with their certification mark or prestige. Your examples illustrate we might effectively cut out the middleman of universities as well. Especially in the case of mathematics, it would seem that correctness could be mechanically verified by a proof verifier, novelty by the lack of the theorem and proof in some decentralized system (which only admits verified proofs) and significance I will leave open to the readers personal preference of establishing. Perhaps significance could be established by challenge? i.e. before publishing your proof, you publish the theorem, and as time passes the reward increases, so if the problem is hard nobody else finds a solution and your tradeoff is low yield impatience or higher yield patience. If one or more people submit a solution (or its hash) then there is a deadline (say a month or perhaps a year) at which point everybody is expected to reveal the solution (original claimant last, so if people bluff they can't force you to prematurely release the solution). If multiple parties found a valid proof the rewards are split by some predetermined method. Just thinking out loud how at least pure math progress could be decentralized... The rewards you get could have a financial value, or you could use thee crypto-value for rewarding people to formalize supposed proofs from a text (if you have loads of texts that might interest you if only you had the assurance that the proofs check out, i.e. perhaps a substantial number of papers are bogus results!) My condolences regarding your wife, that is a very sad story. And a perfect example of how universities don't do what they are supposed to do: foster and develop an individual's skills...