6 reasons you shouldn ’ t bet on blockchain disrupting healthcare

[Image from Daniel von Appen on Unsplash]Blockchain is the big buzzword these days, bruited as a disruptive force for industries covering the spectrum. But there seems to be little understanding of what exactly “blockchain” means, let alone how it could affect so many different markets so profoundly. Simply put, a blockchain is a decentralized database with tight rules about how data is entered, maintained and accessed. Instead of being stored at a single location, the data in a blockchain are stored in a series of discrete nodes. Think of it as a connected series of ledgers, each with identical data. Because each transaction must be exactly the same across all the ledgers, blockchains are “very difficult to work with, expensive to maintain, hard to upgrade and a pain to scale,” writes developer Jimmy Song at the Medium website. “The main thing distinguishing a blockchain from a normal database is that there are specific rules about how to put data into the database. That is, it cannot conflict with some other data that’s already in the database (consistent), it’s append-only (immutable), and the data itself is locked to an owner (ownable), it’s replicable and available. Finally, everyone agrees on what the state of the things in the database are (canonical) without a central party (decentralized),” according to Song. “It is this last point that really is the holy grail of blockchain. Decentralization is very attract...
Source: Mass Device - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Big Data Software / IT blockchains Source Type: news