Healthcare and blockchain

Today on the podcast, Dr. Tony Little and I talk about healthcare on blockchain. There's a lot about healthcare that makes blockchain seem like the wrong solution. After all, your personal health data needs to be kept private (HIPAA). Putting it on a public blockchain seems wrong. This leads to discussion about private and permissioned blockchains as well as different ways to manage patient data.

Even if you have no interest in the healthcare use case, there's a lot to be learned from how different industries intend to use blockchain (or any technology for that matter). There are accessibility concerns with existing L1 (layer one) blockchains that require L2 (layer two) solutions -- even in healthcare where there's plenty of money to go around.

At one point in the interview, we talk about how "L1s aren't meant for users". This is true to an extent because blockchains are just a decentralized protocol. It's the apps that are built on top of the protocol that bring in users. If apps can't afford to run on a given blockchain, then you have to look to L2 (or alternative L1s).

What do you think? Do fee-less smart contracts fix these accessibility constraints or just replace them with different issues?

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More tomorrow,

-Luke

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P.S. Tony and I work together at Prescryptive Health. This wasn't meant to be an ad for the company, but we do talk about it since our perspective on the topic is heavily influenced by our work there.

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