Taking risks for their own sake is not a very bright idea. In this regard, gambling serves a good purpose (unlike extreme sports for adrenaline-seekers, e.g. cliff jumpers). It's good in that you are losing only your money, and oftentimes that's enough to understand that you only live once before it's too late. On the other hand, taking calculated risks when the reward-to-risk ratio is high is another matter provided you know what you are doing

Long story short, there are different types of risks and how you are related to them

Gambling, and crypto gambling in particular, is a niche market

Put differently, it's not likely we wake up tomorrow and cryptocurrencies get accepted everywhere because of gambling. As said in the article, gambling was vitally important for Bitcoin's initial boost, but currently, its potential is pretty much depleted and exhausted. It doesn't mean that gambling is irrelevant, but it is just there already unlike blockchain gaming which is still on its way to the peak (hopefully)

It seems that my theory may in fact quite accurately predict the direction we are moving along. If you wonder what theory I'm talking about, here's the relevant part:


The recent dynamic of both Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash shows that this use of crypto may be picking up indeed. We can't yet say that for certain, but if things continue to develop along this vector, there will be a clearer and more convincing evidence of the change toward using select cryptos as a means of payment

I called this development a paradigm shift

У этой поговорки еще есть и продолжение

И полностью она звучит так: "Trend is your friend until it stabs you in the back (with a chopstick)". Логика у последователей ловцов тренда достаточно проста и статистически верна на практически любом таймфрейме. Если мы возьмем исторические данные для анализа, то окажется, что вероятность продолжения движения цены в том же направлении выше, чем вероятность разворота. Почему в большинстве случаев это не работает на практике – отдельный вопрос, достойный отдельного поста, а то и двух

I think I can offer a better explanation (just an opinion)

Wolf.bet is now a well-established casino in this space (despite many futile attempts at disparaging it in the past), and the change you see reflects that. Whales are not interested in betting with doges like small fish are. And because Bitcoin is the leading cryptocurrency and the coin of choice for crypto millionaires (all things considered), you would now expect the top dogs, nay, wolves bet with Bitcoin mostly. In other words, this is the way they have always been betting, but now they started to bet on Wolf.bet. In a way, it is a natural development given this rise to prominence and the credibility that the casino have managed to build

This is not about btc (Bitcoin)

Obviously, you refer to blockchain and make it sound like blockchain should be used everywhere in any industry. This is not so. There are areas where it can be useful as well as areas where it will be useless. The point is, in many cases we can't figure that out until we actually try things with it

And healthcare is no exception. It is an extremely complex space, and you can be dead certain that it is horribly ineffective. I think the pandemic has shown this state of affairs abundantly clear, blockchain or otherwise. But it's also done a good thing in that it revealed these inefficiencies which can now be improved if there is a will and intention

Sitting down goes against everything I stand for

Data on a blockchain is as secure as the blockchain itself is

In other words, if you don't share your private keys with anyone (read, someone doesn't steal them from you), the possibility of hacking your data is the same as hacking the entire blockchain. Possible as in not completely improbable, but can turn out prohibitively expensive. Moreover, blockchain-based EHRs will allow you to fine-tune the access policies, i.e. who can access what exactly. Put simply, your personal health information remains your private property at all times

Okay, I will send the link to your post, and, hopefully, your questions and concerns will be addressed fully

Most important, it will be exceptionally interesting to see if there is some real-life use already. But to repeat, I'm in no way affiliated with this service, so I express entirely my own opinion here. However, even if a given project may be yet another attempt at just riding the speculative frenzy and raking in profits while it is hot and high, the concept itself intuitively feels promising to me, i.e. blockchain as a common ground or foundation for interaction of all market participants (and probably cutting down on their number in the process)

It doesn't work that way

You can well kiss your money goodbye in your mind, but when it actually comes to that still feel a lot of pain and regrets, up to a point when you become obsessed and start chasing losses. Long story short, thinking something and feeling it with your skin in game are two entirely different things. Sometimes they match, but most often they do not

Solve.Care will probably get a dedicated article (review)

So, for your reading pleasure, I will try to seek out the answers to these and other concerns if it ever comes to that (though I can't promise anything yet). To me, it looks a pretty solid project, and there can be legit reasons behind creation of a token. For example, a token as a health record (effectively, an NFT), i.e. not meant to be a cryptocurrency, sort of

It is not only about storing data privately and securely

It is rather about the lack of proper coordination between market participants which leads to lots of middlemen that only make the problem worse. Blockchain removes these intermediaries by providing a decentralized and trustless environment that is beneficial to all major participants (other than intermediaries). This is the approach that Solve.Care tries to follow. They seem to be doing it the right way

Добавлена статья о перспективах использования блокчейна в индустрии здравоохранения: How Can Blockchain Improve Healthcare?

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A new article about blockchain and how it can improve healthcare has been added: How Can Blockchain Improve Healthcare?

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Can blockchain improve the healthcare systems around the world? If you're interested in finding that out, read my new piece on the topic below (and don't forget to share your thoughts). Originally published on stealthex.io

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Short Version

As the Covid-19 pandemic is not going away, modern healthcare has been proving again and again its inefficiency and inefficacy, mostly due to countless intermediaries that make it too costly and clumsy. Blockchain can help in such areas as, for example, electronic health records, patient data management, clinical data exchange and interoperability. Most importantly, we are now facing the problem of digital medical passports and immunity certificates. This is a highly controversial topic which can quickly become our new reality, and a painful one at that – right after masks and social distancing

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Full Version

People have short memories, which is not a bad thing in itself considering the fact that happiness is good health and a short memory. Today, with the exception of a few historians and half a dozen scientists, no one remembers that in the 14th century the Black Death plague wiped out two-thirds of the Earth’s population within years. So would blockchain be able to stop or at least alleviate the deadliest pandemic ever?

We don’t know that, and we can only pray that we would never have to find out in practice. However, we have a new plague – Covid-19, and who knows what is to crop up next and how much life it is going to waste. So there’s still a need to explore the ways in which blockchain can improve the healthcare system and make our lives better despite those nasty minuscule monsters sticking around us and relentlessly trying to make their way in.

Blockchain and Healthcare

Today’s healthcare environment consists of a few key players such as healthcare providers, pharma manufacturers, and consumers, that is to say, patients, if we can call them players indeed. However, the space is also infested with all kinds of intermediaries collectively known as pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). Apart from these, there are as well retail pharmacies (your nearby drugstore) and drug wholesalers – distributors who purchase large quantities of medications directly from manufacturers or bigger wholesalers and then sell them at a profit to pharmacies or smaller wholesalers.

It seems unlikely that human beings are going to become totally healthy all of a sudden and not susceptible to the whole range of illnesses, disorders and other medical conditions. With that in mind, the healthcare system as a whole is going to stay around in the foreseeable future. Blockchain won’t be able to free us from healthcare providers, drug manufacturers, and, alas, patients either. Fortunately, the benefits of blockchain technologies and smart contracts are still pretty impressive to make it worth the effort of introducing and putting them to work for the common good, healthcare included.

Blockchain could remove a number of middlemen that only add complexity to the system resulting in higher prices of medical care. This mostly refers to pharmacy benefit managers, a thoroughly obscured part of healthcare finance. It is a numerous group of middlemen that in many cases can be safely disposed of through technical innovation. Ironically, in 2017 the largest American PBMs had booked higher profits than the largest pharmaceutical manufacturers, which clearly demonstrates the potential of blockchain in this field of healthcare and the amount of the taxpayer’s money that can be saved here.

By area of application, blockchain can help reduce costs in electronic health records (EHRs) and patient data management, clinical data exchange and interoperability, supply chain management, digital medical passports and immunity certificates (particularly useful in times like these), health plan claims and insurance in general, among many other areas. In the following section we are going to take a closer look at what blockchain already brings to the healthcare table.

So is there anything real yet?

It’s little wonder that in the times of the coronavirus reigning supreme, with faces behind masks, empty streets, parks and stadiums, the idea of improving the healthcare system via blockchain got so wide a traction in today’s world. Below we are going to discuss a couple of projects that are focused on improving access to healthcare and administering it more efficiently for the sake of reducing its costs. As outlined above, there are many fields where there is a job for blockchain, so these are just two examples from a much longer list of new projects currently active or being bootstrapped in this space.

One of these projects is Patientory, with its mission to make healthcare more affordable and accessible to everyone. The project features a mobile app that provides its users with a secure platform to access, manage, and share their health data. At its heart, it is an effort to change how doctors and patients interact by removing unnecessary layers and processes that get in the way of this interaction. Simply put, it strives to empower patients, both existing and potential, to take charge of their health. So how can the Patientory app facilitate this effort by utilizing the blockchain stuff?

In brief, Patientory employs blockchain as a secure means to store and share EHRs between patients and healthcare providers – doctors and hospitals, in the vast majority of cases. The Patientory app allows its users to collect in one place and share when required their complete medical histories aggregated across different providers and medical facilities over time. You can think of it as your digital health passport. To make it a viable business model, Patientory introduced PTOY, a utility token with which users can buy storage on the blockchain network as well as execute smart contracts for payment.

Our next project, Solve.Care, whose star has been rising since 2017, looks for “making healthcare and benefit programs work better for everyone” and “solving complex problems that plague healthcare around the world”. So how is it going to do all that and what leverage can the blockchain tech offer to help accomplish these noble goals? In a nutshell, the project follows a patient-centric approach that tries to bring together the requisite elements of modern healthcare – clinical, administrative, and financial. In practice, that means coordinating the activities of insurance companies and government agencies, healthcare providers and benefit managers, pharmacies and manufacturers.

As you may have already guessed, at Solve.Care blockchain serves as the basis for putting all these diverse pieces together to remove the stumbling blocks in care coordination. This is a daunting task on its own and also the primary reason why healthcare systems around the world are so incredibly complex, ineffective, and, most importantly, failing nowadays. In this vein, blockchain may be exactly what the doctor ordered (pardon the pun) as it is well equipped to tame these goliaths. To get there, Solve.Care developed the SOLVE token, a utility token to power the decentralized Solve.Care platform through which the market participants can coordinate their efforts without friction, hassle, and lots of overhead costs.

And when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. That’s why Solve.Care was awarded the Most Innovative Blockchain Project Award at the Blockchain Life 2019 Forum in Singapore. Now fast forward to 2020 where the contemporary healthcare systems are hopelessly losing their battle against the coronavirus, and you will start to see the real value that the blockchain tech can bring to the industry.

Future Prospects

The Covid-19 pandemic is set to make drastic changes in the healthcare systems around the world. In fact, these changes are already well underway. For example, the proposal to create digital medical passports and immunity certificates is not entirely new, but these days it is no longer a theoretical construct despite being highly controversial.

Quite a few projects are now in the process of designing working prototypes, with some already being tested in practice. The basic idea behind health passports is to produce a verified health status of an individual so that people will be able to access crowded public locations like stadiums and airports. Right, it is not anymore just about wearing masks.

And if this push becomes overwhelming and takes roots, which may well be the case, blockchain is definitely capable of delivering a trustless and secure environment for it. So let’s keep our fingers crossed!

I'm in:

Bitcointalk username: deisik
Bitcointalk profile URL: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=156665
Amount of earned merit in the last 120 days: 46
BTC Address: 15ude7kyiDbqGSH36FbcyRm1bHq37nxcLN

I'm writing a book about hurricanes and tornadoes... It's only a draft at the moment

We used to have empires run by emperors and kingdoms run by kings... Now we have countries

Police were called to a daycare where a 3 year old was resisting a rest

Добавлена вторая часть статьи, посвященной технологии смарт-контрактов: Smart Contracts And Their Mission - Part 2

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