Blockchain Covid Nonsense

This was inevitable. We live in the time of Covid. Blockchain groupies keep casting around for ways to justify blockchain. They intersect. This is what happens. Cointelegraph is a blockchain newspaper that peddles nonsense. This singularly unhelpful article was recently bleated to the masses, ‘Blockchain Can Help Find a Cure for COVID-19’.

You see, ‘blockchain can help find a cure for COVID-19 which will play a big role in the technology’s adoption’.

The naive (gullible) reader might think Wow! and keep reading. How do they do this wonderful thing? (Sarcasm.) The article refers to an earlier article in May 2020, ‘Many Blockchain Projects Are Uniquely Suited to COVID-19 Research, Here’s How’.

The Covid research involves simulating protein folding configurations, which is very intensive. Miners would ‘ donate idle CPU and GPU power toward fighting’ Covid. Very laudable. The problem is that blockchain methods are unrelated to this. A miner might as well be anyone who has a lot of GPU and CPU machines for playing games, which is what the GPUs are well suited for. There is nothing specifically blockchain about this. So why should blockchain get any credit for an anti-Covid activity?

Let’s be fair. At least the miners are foregoing their income made by mining and are turning their machines to finding proteins. But it’s not even this! The May article says in a moment of candor, ‘Unfortunately, the popular ASIC miners that are often used for Bitcoin and similar assets are too specifically designed toward cryptocurrency to be used for folding research, which is unfortunate due to the sheer amount of computing power they can muster.’

In other words, all that talk in the May and July articles is fluff. The miners turning their machines to finding proteins is futile. But you have to drill down from the July article to the May article to find this.

Given the spurious use of blockchain machines to find proteins, why should this ‘play a big role in the technology’s adoption’. If anything it should discredit the actions of the blockchain miners. Might they just be trying to glom onto Covid’s importance?

There is more. The May article goes on to talk about an actual use of blockchain, for tracing infected people. It described how the Algorand Foundation (Singapore) said this. The key quote is ‘Users, including non-symptomatic ones, are able to anonymously report quarantine and medical information. The app is built on the Algorand public blockchain’.

What’s wrong with that? The blockchain/crypto crowd is a secular cult. They have a fetish about anonymous. To them it is a fundamental good. Against Covid, this is death. For tracing to work, the health people doing tracing must know the names and places of those they test. If an infected person is found, they can find and quarantine her. Forcibly if need be. This is true for any contagious disease. No health personnel would use this blockchain.

But what about the users? The anonymous nature of the blockchain record means the user’s name and address is not recorded. What’s the point of the data then? If this information is missing, it is of no help. Even in a historic sense. Suppose after Covid is defeated, analysts look at the Algorand blockchain. What use is the data? You can’t even find where the infected person lived. All they have is a bunch of isolated dots, unconnected to anything.

Do the reporters for Cointelegraph use any logic? Do their readers? Did anyone truly understand the articles? Cointelegraph did not let readers of either article post comments. Which is why I write here.