
Technology behind Bitcoin could aid science, report says - digital55
http://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.1.20171201a/full/
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arcticfox
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.

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kaffeemitsahne
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?

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Dylan16807
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
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.

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arcticfox
I think the problem is in trying to force application of "distributed
trustless consensus" to way more things than actually require them, not in
that there are better distributed-trustless-consensus solutions.

~~~
IanCal
I agree, but I don't know if that applies here. Again, there are grants twice
a year without any restrictions like this. If you've got a good solution to a
problem in the relevant domain then you're not being excluded by another grant
being made available.

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westurner
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?

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nrhk
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
> 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.

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avian
> 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
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.

