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by ptk921 3089 days ago
Hi Api. Your questions are _spot_ on!

Speculative investing + skyrocketing valuations does encourage highly motivated reasoning-- a unique kind of confirmation bias:

"This technology MUST be the answer to all the problems of the future because I'm getting wealthier TODAY!"

Irrational exuberance is rampant.

That said -- the recent New Yorker article on Estonia's digital society [1] covered that country's usage of a blockchain to manage patient healthcare records.

> the backbone of Estonia’s digital security is a blockchain technology called K.S.I.

K.S.I. from Guardtime [2] is an enterprise permissioned blockchain that is less decentralized than bitcoin and ethereum. Still, its exciting to see that Estonia is leveraging immutability and (some) decentralization to build a secure persistence layer that provides data provenance and a log of data access for management of their citizens' personal data, including healthcare records.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-di... [2] https://guardtime.com/technology

1 comments

Sure, but Lituania also didn't need to use the Blockchain for this use case.
> Lituania

You didn't even read properly - we were talking Estonia. At the scale of a local health care system the blockchain is perhaps really nothing more than a fancy database, if at that scale it will stay energy efficient for a long while.

If you read correctly, I was not taking any exception to energy efficiency aspect of using Blockchain, either.