[hackeyed]

The problem with using the blockchain for this is that there are legitimate reasons to withdraw such a registration ranging from misstyping (s/increase/decrease anyone?) to, depending on your kind of study, the inclusion of personally identifiable information. The solution currently being pursued is to expand pre-registration, a practice from clinical research, into other fields.

In pre-registration a trusted intermediary is used to store a read-only copy of your study design and materials, ideally including a pre-analysis plan that specifies the analysis you will run for hypothesis testing (so that we can cut P-hacking out of the picture at the same time). That intermediary can allow researchers to withdraw registrations while preserving a stub that shows everyone a registration used to be there and why it was removed.

That is how pre-registrations work on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io), a cross-disciplinary FOSS web tool run by the Center for Open Science.