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>"immutable, distributed, cryptographically-verified database" >Byzantine fault tolerance, public consensus, and mining Why would I want ANY of these things a

>"immutable, distributed, cryptographically-verified database" >Byzantine fault tolerance, public consensus, and mining Why would I want ANY of these things associated with the system that manages my medical records? I don't want them to be immutable, if there's an error I want it corrected. Clearly there should be security to control who (my provider) can update them, and perhaps turn on the database transaction log to track what updates were made by whom and when. I don't want my medical records to be distributed for obvious reasons. Encrypted, sure, but "cryptologically verified" seems to be overkill as there's little incentive for third parties to try and forge medical records. Byzantine fault tolerance? Lol. My medical records get updated maybe once per year, by my provider, and no one has an incentive to insert false data. Public consensus? See above. Mining? Come on. 99.9% of the time when someone says we should use blockchain, they really just need a database, this is one of those cases.

dikei 8y ago
>> I don't want them to be immutable, if there's an error I want it corrected. Immutable here means no in-place update, you have to update using an "errata" record. This is the requirement for many type of official documents, even before computers were used. >> I don't want my medical records to be distributed for obvious reasons. Distributed here means no single point of failure. >> Encrypted, sure, but "cryptographically-verified" seems to be overkill as there's little incentive for third parties to try and forge medical records. Encryption without authentication opens up many types of attack. You almost always want authenticated encryption
- DebtDeflation 8y ago
  >>>Immutable here means no in-place update, you have to update using an "errata" record. Yes, and people have been building financial systems with relational databases using this journaling principle (updates and deletes handled by inserting new records and timestamping) for decades. >>>Distributed here means no single point of failure. Which can be done with most standard RDBMS or NoSQL databases and clustering/sharding. Not that the scale of medical records is anywhere near requiring any of this. Do you really want multiple copies of your personal medical records on some public blockchain? >>>Encryption without authentication opens up many types of attack. You almost always want authenticated encryption For financial transactions, sure, but for medical records? For what purpose? Other than me and my provider (and any specialist I select) why would anyone else even need to access my medical records? Who would be faking them? None of this makes any sense for medical records.
  - dikei 8y ago
    Make up your mind. First, you said these properties were useless, now you're saying these properties have been in use for a long time using relational database, which means they're really useful. >> Do you really want multiple copies of your personal medical records on some public blockchain? No I don't. This thread's starter and I never said that these properties can only provided by "blockchain", neither did we said that "blockchain" should be used. We only said that these properties were useful and people wanted them. >> For financial transactions, sure, but for medical records? For what purpose? Other than me and my provider (and any specialist I select) why would anyone else even need to access my medical records? Who would be faking them? For example, a fraudulent specialist with access to your data can modify your prescription so they can steal money from your insurance provider and also take these extra medicine to sell on the black market.
GoblinSlayer 8y ago
If something goes wrong, you don't want tampered data, hence immutability.
JohnFen 8y ago
> I don't want my medical records to be distributed for obvious reasons. Technically, you do. If you go to see a different health care provider than usual, you want them to access your medical records. I don't see how the blockchain is the best solution for this, but the distributed part isn't really the problematic part.

dikei 8y ago

>> I don't want them to be immutable, if there's an error I want it corrected. Immutable here means no in-place update, you have to update using an "errata" record. This is the requirement for many type of official documents, even before computers were used. >> I don't want my medical records to be distributed for obvious reasons. Distributed here means no single point of failure. >> Encrypted, sure, but "cryptographically-verified" seems to be overkill as there's little incentive for third parties to try and forge medical records. Encryption without authentication opens up many types of attack. You almost always want authenticated encryption

DebtDeflation 8y ago
>>>Immutable here means no in-place update, you have to update using an "errata" record. Yes, and people have been building financial systems with relational databases using this journaling principle (updates and deletes handled by inserting new records and timestamping) for decades. >>>Distributed here means no single point of failure. Which can be done with most standard RDBMS or NoSQL databases and clustering/sharding. Not that the scale of medical records is anywhere near requiring any of this. Do you really want multiple copies of your personal medical records on some public blockchain? >>>Encryption without authentication opens up many types of attack. You almost always want authenticated encryption For financial transactions, sure, but for medical records? For what purpose? Other than me and my provider (and any specialist I select) why would anyone else even need to access my medical records? Who would be faking them? None of this makes any sense for medical records.
- dikei 8y ago
  Make up your mind. First, you said these properties were useless, now you're saying these properties have been in use for a long time using relational database, which means they're really useful. >> Do you really want multiple copies of your personal medical records on some public blockchain? No I don't. This thread's starter and I never said that these properties can only provided by "blockchain", neither did we said that "blockchain" should be used. We only said that these properties were useful and people wanted them. >> For financial transactions, sure, but for medical records? For what purpose? Other than me and my provider (and any specialist I select) why would anyone else even need to access my medical records? Who would be faking them? For example, a fraudulent specialist with access to your data can modify your prescription so they can steal money from your insurance provider and also take these extra medicine to sell on the black market.

GoblinSlayer 8y ago

If something goes wrong, you don't want tampered data, hence immutability.

JohnFen 8y ago

> I don't want my medical records to be distributed for obvious reasons. Technically, you do. If you go to see a different health care provider than usual, you want them to access your medical records. I don't see how the blockchain is the best solution for this, but the distributed part isn't really the problematic part.