Yeah, it's like Americans have this massive blindspot when it comes to government. The "problem" of standardized medical record storage and distribution has bee

Yeah, it's like Americans have this massive blindspot when it comes to government. The "problem" of standardized medical record storage and distribution has been thoroughly solved in France. There you have a nationwide system of healthcare and there are largely no issues with medical record access. (Which is not to say it's perfect but what you're dealing with are largely internal organizational issues not the massive coordination issues that make American healthcare so unpredictable and expensive.) There's this very naieve view that blockchains are somehow going to replace governments. I think a lot of people are in for a very rude awakening. The government, as they say, are the guys with the guns. It highly unlikely that they will surrender enormous power and privilege to decentralized networks. When it comes to currency, capital formation, medicine, energy, defense and transportation the governments will step in to ensure they remain firmly in control. These are political "core competencies" that no government in their right mind will abrogate. This is what makes all these blockchain delusions about a blockchain of medical records so stupid and pointless. If there were such a blockchain it would be controlled by the government in which case you wouldn't need a blockchain at all as everything could be done much faster, cheaper and more securely using a centralized, government-controlled database. I mean, really? Do people not see this? And the idea of "forking" Google or Amazon is so hilariously dumb all I can do cringe that somebody seriously wrote that and put their name behind it. It's clear now that many of these blockchain advocates don't really understand where the blockchain is actually useful. There actually is a class of problems that require global, decentralized, democratic consensus and are not susceptible to economies of scale but are susceptible to network effects. (I say democratic consensus here because this idea that blockchains are "trustless" is nonsense. Every blockchain is a democracy and democracy requires enormous trust. As we've seen again and again if the majority of nodes vote one way you have no choice but to follow or lose all your assets. Blockchains do not fulfill this libertarian fantasy of freedom from democracy.) This class of problems does not overlap with what governments at all. But it does overlap almost 100% with those problems that the internet has already solved so successfully. Particularly investors like USV should be looking at their previous tech investments -- Twitter, blogging, open source companies, digital collaboration, content generation, messaging -- and thinking about how blockchains could help these problems. TLDR: the blockchains aren't anything new. They're global, decentralized networks that let millions of people communicate and coordinate in real-time. Just like the internet itself.