So you also need to get rid of drug databases, PubMed, protein databases, etc.
This makes no sense. If your government is in such bad shape you have far bigger problems than keeping track of drug trials.
"Blockchain" just stores the same stuff lots and lots of times in as many places as possible. Extremely wasteful and expensive, with all the overhead of doing that (and updating hat "database"), plus the consensus algorithm which may or may not be reliable/crackable.
Is it a sign of the times, and maybe in some countries more than in others, that there is a hype around mistrust? Trying to build a world where trust is not necessary? I bet that won't work. I think you need to fix the trust issue more directly, working around the trust requirement won't work. It just creates huge complexity and even more points of failure. Especially since you would have to go "all in": What's the point in taking just one thing into the trust-free solution? All those things depend on one another, you would have to do it with all or most of them to get the benefit you are looking for. It may look manageable if you only look at one particular thing, but imagine everything had to be stored in such a way, the incredible effort required, and the more distribution there is the harder it is to understand what's going on.
You really think storing all kinds of data in as many places as possible and then trusting an algorithm to sort it all out, the "truth", works better than trust in a credible entity? At scale (in more than one dimension)?
> "Blockchain" just stores the same stuff lots and lots of times in as many places as possible. Extremely wasteful and expensive, with all the overhead of doing that (and updating hat "database"), plus the consensus algorithm which may or may not be reliable/crackable.
No. Blockchain doesn’t have to be wasteful. In general is enough to store the hash of the data in the blockchain and the data itself somewhere where it can be accessed. This prevents manipulation. If at least one trusted party has access to the data it also would not just vanished. If you had an permissioned blockchain signed by the top universities of the world it could be done for very little money.
There seems little upside between what this paper proposes and everybody just sending all data to all stakeholders of figure 1. The blockchain itself does not conserve confidentiality of placebo placements outside of this process and "Regulatory agency" and "Data safety monitoring board" are presumably two trusted parties that could, post hoc, compare their two databases and draw the same conclusions.
Adding a semi-public blockchain seems like a neat little tidbit but it mostly adds a formalization of the process (which would of course be a good thing) and buzzword-worthiness, thus warranting the "wasteful" label.
> permissioned blockchain [...] for very little money
Is that a solved problem yet?
> If your government is in such bad shape you have far bigger problems than keeping track of drug trials.
I agree with the parent but I also agree with this, at the very least with the US government. If you think it's not in bad shape then you're living in a fantasy. All it takes is somebody with an agenda to start changing facts from being science based to being what you personally believe in or what corporations want. One such example of this is Pruitt at the EPA.
For the current clinical trial mechanism to work at all, you are relying on a deep level of trust and professionalism. If you don't have that, you're going to have to imagine a radical, nearly complete transformation of how this sort of science is being done. If you do have that, I don't see what tracking a small piece of it with a blockchain really buys you.
