The BRID Network is currently in development and plans to onboard the world's top one million scientists to a uniquely designed web3 ecosystem, giving them a secure platform to protect, grow, and capitalize on their valuable intellectual property, individually and as teams of many researchers as could be ever needed.

The BRID Network will use blockchain technology to create a field-agnostic decentralized system for storing and sharing scientific data. This will overcome the many challenges facing researchers today, including concerns over data security, intellectual property, and the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

By translating their credibility and reputation from status-quo web2 science systems to the new scientific web3 ecosystem, researchers will be able to protect their work from theft or misuse by others. Furthermore, the platform will promote cross-disciplinary collaboration, breaking down traditional silos between different fields of research, and accelerating scientific progress.

The potential of the BRID Network is vast, and it is expected to significantly impact scientific research across a range of fields. For example, in the field of medicine, the ability to share data and collaborate across different medical specialties could lead to new breakthroughs in disease prevention and treatment. Similarly, in the energy field, data sharing between researchers could lead to more efficient and sustainable energy solutions.

But the BRID Network is not the only blockchain-based project driving innovation in the world of scientific research. The Ocean Protocol, for example, is creating a blockchain-based platform for sharing and monetizing data. This could be particularly useful for scientists who generate large amounts of data, allowing them to monetize their work and potentially attract investment from interested parties.

Another project, Molecule is leveraging blockchain to create a decentralized platform for drug research and development. Molecule is a decentralized biotech protocol, building a web3 marketplace for research-related IP. Our platform connects academics and biotech companies with quick and easy funding while enabling patient, researcher, and investor communities to directly govern and own research-related IP.

As these projects continue to develop and evolve, it is clear that blockchain technology has the potential to transform the way we conduct scientific research. The ability to store and share data securely and transparently will open up new avenues for collaboration and discovery, ultimately leading to a better understanding of the world around us and the ability to tackle some of the most pressing challenges facing humanity today.

The BRID Network is an exciting development in DeSci space, and one that is sure to be closely watched by the scientific community and the wider technology industry. Its potential to onboard the world's top scientists to the web3 ecosystem could pave the way for a new scientific discovery and progress era.

However, the success of the BRID Network will depend on a number of factors. For one, it will need to demonstrate its ability to provide a secure and decentralized platform for storing and sharing scientific data. It will also need to prove its ability to attract and retain top scientific talent, as well as secure funding to support its ongoing development and growth.

Despite these challenges, the potential benefits of the BRID Network and other blockchain-based projects in the field of scientific research cannot be ignored. As we look to the future, it is clear that these projects will continue to shape the way we conduct scientific research and drive technological innovation.

I was 16, back in 1998, when I first used the internet on a 486 Compaq, and the very simple idea that I could access computers anywhere in the world was mind blowing. This was the beginning of the connectivity miracle, that constituted the DNA of what you are using now to read this letter. Twenty four years later, your company has just brought the miracle of intelligent machines to life. It is not GPT’s Large Language Model or sophisticated learning algorithms and stochastic functions that what brought machine intelligence to life, of course not, it is the adoption rate of your polished technology. Your robot will soon cross one billion users, making it the largest intelligent machine a man has built. One billion people who will ask questions to your robot and wait for answers, to play at first, but then to learn. One billion people will start to have frequent, perhaps daily, interactions with an intelligent machine that can help them augment their intelligence, but more dangerously, their intellect. Just imagine university students using GPT and other third-party products, which will enhance and improve its capabilities, to write theses and publish papers. Just imagine how will it be possible for anyone to represent any profession or career online and be an expert behind a blog, a magazine, or an online community. In the matter of fact, words like experience will soon be hollow and meaningless, because the ability to store knowledge, connect and use it according to sense impressions and cognitive signaling will carry very little value — if any — compared with ChatGPT-X.

My son is confused because he doesn’t know if he should still be learning at school or not, because he doesn’t know if you would find a job or not, or if even if his painting and art talents would be of any value in few years. I am confused because OpenAI keeps silent about the most fundamental questions concerning GPT now and in the future: What is its impact on epistemology? What is the distinction between human-created and machine-synthesized knowledge? And how will it be possible to distinguish between them? And what is the future of learning and pedagogy with ChatGPT-X?

The massive organic adoption rates, that OpenAI is now celebrating, do promise the possibility of a better future, there is no question about that. But in the same time they definitely ring the bell for ensuring that it will be used the right way! The company’s leadership and investors must be aware that they are creating a singularity and it will test their integrity and ethics at first, and then all of us will follow. It is the right time for OpenAI to declare its position on these crucial issues to the public, before they release GPT-4.

If you expected science to give all the answers to the wonderful questions about what we are, where we're going, what's the meaning of the universe and so on, then I think you could easily become disillusioned and then look for some mystic answer to these problems you're exploring.

We're trying to find out as much as we can about the world. People say to me: Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics? No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world, and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything, so be it, that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers, and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is. But whatever way it comes out, its nature is there and she's going to come out the way she is. And therefore when we go to investigate it we shouldn't pre-decide what it is we're trying to do, except to find out more about it.

So altogether I can't believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large. Because they seem to be too local to provincial. The earth, he came to the earth; one of the aspects of God came to the earth mind you, and look at what's out there. It isn't in proportion.

But also another thing, it has to do with the question of how do you find out if something's true, and if you have all these theories of the different religions have all different theories about the thing, then you begin to wonder. Once you start doubting, which I think is to me is a very fundamental part of my soul is to doubt and to ask, when you doubt and ask it gets a little harder to believe.

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing.

I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and the many things I don't know anything about. But I don't have to know an answer, I don't have I don't feel frightened by not knowing things by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell possibly.

It doesn't frighten me.

Beside quantum computing, artificial intelligence and big data, blockchain is a true paradigm-shift in the utility of digital technology, and it keeps growing by the minute. Blockchain is transforming almost all industries that require decent levels of information security, auditability and transparency. This includes finance and banking, manufacturing, R&D, and most importantly; healthcare.

But what is blockchain? and how does it associate with cryptocurrency?

Blockchain technology is a digitally encrypted ledger that stores data distributed efficiently amongst synced databases with no compromise on its security and ensuring full privacy. Blockchain transactions are verified, validated and stored on massive networks using encrypted protocols called smart contracts. This makes blockchain an ideal technology to serve almost every human activity where any exchange of value needs to be controlled and secured.

Any cryptocurrency requires a blockchain infrastructure. Cryptocurrencies are created and stored on blockchain and sometimes used to process transactions and use specific services. However, blockchain does not require cryptocurrency to be used as a digital encrypted ledger. In other words, any business can use blockchain for as many purposes as required without having any cryptocurrency involved.

So how blockchain is transforming our healthcare systems?

Secured Data Sharing and Accessibility

Millions of patients sign up every day for various healthcare services worldwide, and updating their records becomes difficult, leading to inefficient treatment and preventative care.

Once the blockchain technology is adopted by a specific healthcare system, patient records will not only be easily stored and updated, they would also be easily accessed by patients (through their mobile phones). Data would be completely secure and reliable for treatment purposes as it would track medication, verify a patient’s health, and follow up management progress. Platforms like Factom, Medical chain, Guardtime, and BurstIQ are excellent examples for offering these use-case scenarios.

Medical Research Sharing and IP Protection

For a long time, a platform for sharing medical research amongst experts and medical leaders has been in great demand. It would make diagnostic and medical improvements and reduce fraud since many trials are left unfinished, creating major gaps in knowledge.

Blockchain can provide such a platform where researches and trials are easily shared amongst professionals and experts while confidentiality and IP protection is maintained. Bloqcube is a pioneer blockchain-based clinical trials platform that “takes trials to patients’ locations saves time and money while making data secure, transparent and available instantaneously.”

DNA Sequencing

Even though home DNA tests are available now for consumers, whole-genome sequencing is still pretty expensive. This leads to inefficient analysis as consumers tend to feel unsafe while sharing their entire genetic code due to security concerns.

This is where blockchain comes in; with its highly secure information handling, entire genetic codes can be provided without the risk of confidentiality or privacy breaches. This would result in an accurate diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Some of the most successful applications used for this purpose are EncrypGen, Simplyvital Health and Nebula Genomics.

The blockchain revolution will keep disrupting our healthcare systems and technologies through this century. While the technology remains in early adoption stage, perhaps through 2030, more applications and innovative use-case scenarios will definitely expand global adoption.

We will see more platforms offering blockchain-based clinical trials and DNA-sequencing sharing features. These platforms will accelerate discovery and innovation in medical research. The growth of blockchain adoption for securing patients’ data will boost the entire value-chain of healthcare systems. Patients will be able to commercialize their medical records for research purposes while ensuring that their privacy is protected and secured.

It was an ordinary morning in the streets of Paris on Monday August 11, 1911 until three men were seen hurrying out from the Louvre museum. These men have just stolen the Mona Lisa!

They’ve spent the night in a supply-closet inside the museum, they came out of it in the morning, stole the masterpiece and managed to board a 7:47 a.m. express train from the Quai d’Orsay station. They had escaped the City of Light with a masterwork of Renaissance painting.

This theft has not only made the Mona Lisa perhaps the most famous painting the world, but it also raised a mounting concern over the fate of human heritage under evolving criminal threats. The painting was returned after 28 months.

However, and before returning the Mona Lisa, six forgeries were produced and sold around the world. Buyers of these counterfeits thought they were buying the original painting as it was publicly known that it had gone missing.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are secured, decentralized and tradable digital assets that promise a democratic, safe and transparent economic future for art, creativity and innovation. From collectibles to digital art and computer games, NFTs have created exchange markets where virtually anyone can sell anything.

Physical art creators, galleries and art dealers are exploring NFT marketplaces such as REALNIFTY and ArtCrypted to capitalize their assets globally with near-perfect exchange efficiency.

NFTs resolve classical challenges of the fine art market, such as authentication, transparency and security. In the music industry, Sony Music Entertainment is investing in MakersPlace, a NFT marketplace that uses blockchain to solve some of the industry’s historic challenges.

Global digital and fine art markets worth somewhat around $70 billion in 2021. Global music and film markets worth $90 billion combined. In an $80 trillion nominal gross world product, these numbers are merely negligible fractions!

The real opportunity of NFTs has a huge potential to transform the world’s most critical markets such as oil & gas, life/health insurance and commercial real estate. These markets have estimated worth of $4.6, $8.45 and $9.6 trillions, respectively.

NFTs can solve long-lasting problems in the oil & gas industry. From decentralizing exploration projects to production control, NFTs can eliminate black markets and improve market resilience to regional and international disruptions.

In healthcare, the impact of NFTs is shifting the entire industry’s value-chain. Now, NFTs capitalize DNA sequencing and govern blood donation procedures. In real estate markets, NFTs can make trading much easier and secured. One of the things that help adoption of NFTs in real estate markets is that they both share common attributes in their essence as assets and store-of-value.

In fact, any economic transaction requires authentication for ownership transfer and security to protect assets from theft. Tokenization is perhaps the most intelligent technology infrastructure for human economic activities. It is so simple in its conception, yet it is changing our consciousness regarding central concepts to our civilization such as value, trade and ownership. It is just a matter of a decade or two until we live in a tokenized world where transactions of the physical reality will only take place in the digital reality.

If there’s one constant rule in economics it is the fact that an asset is anything that has a price and a willing buyer. No matter what the asset is, as long as there’s a willing buyer, there will always be a price, and a value.

There is no doubt that ideas are assets, perhaps the most difficult to trade! That is why there are so many ways to value ideas and determine their actual worth. Unlike a house, a stock or a piece of rare jewelry, an idea must conform with some extrinsic conditions to find buyers who are willing to exchange value to own the rights of capitalizing such an idea.

Having an idea protected by a patent is perhaps the most commonly accepted condition for ideas to acquire an exchange value. Having a well-protected trade secret with proven value-creation potential is another condition for valuing ideas. Startup founders work so hard to demonstrate the value of their ideas by many ways, including executing them first on a small scale to staple a value based on market actions and promises.

Trade secrets live much longer than patents. However, for a trade secret to be exchanged as an asset, it requires extensive market validation. Trade secrets require high levels of information security to keep them safe from competitors. From Coca Cola formula to Google Search Algorithm, trade secrets have to be well guarded and secured in order to claim high value for their rights. Coca-Cola claims its formula is the “world’s most guarded secret.” The recipe, the company says, is now kept in a purpose-built vault within the company’s headquarters in Atlanta.

What if a 17 years old kid in Cuba comes up with a better formula than Coca Cola’s?

What if a computer engineer in Egypt designs a more robust search algorithms than Google’s?

What are their chances for capitalizing their ideas?

Is it easy for these remote inventors in marginalized economies to build startups based on their ideas? What if they just want to sell these ideas to companies that actually have the resources to turn their ideas to valuable trade secrets?

Blockchain comes in as a democratization framework to enable a global idea-driven economy. Decentralized ledgers can power secured digital vaults and marketplaces to let inventors secure and trade their ideas and designs.

Securing Trade Secrets and Safeguarding IP Rights

Unlike patents, trade secrets do not require uniqueness search and do not have to embody a record of existing relevant conceptions. A trade secret is basically any information that has inherent value because it is not generally known or readily ascertainable by others, and which the owner(s) takes necessary measures to keep secret.

A trade secret, therefore, requires a proof of ownership and measures to keep it secret. Bernstein.io is a blockchain-secured IP rights platform that offers both ownership proof and crypto-protection for trade secrets and other forms of IP. Bernstein allows anyone to record their innovation and creation processes using the Bitcoin blockchain and national timestamping authorities.

Ideas, represented by digital files of any size and format, can be quickly registered online to prove existence, ownership, and development over time, in real-time. Most importantly, all notarized data will remain perfectly private, thanks to a unique cryptographic layer.

Trading Ideas: What NFTs Can Offer

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are digital representations of unique assets created using blockchain smart contracts. For the past few years, NFTs has soared as a new layer of the blockchain economy with market cap reaching $ 315M in 2020 from $30M in 2017. So far NFTs are mostly used in the gaming industry and for trading digital art.

NFTs offer an efficient DeFi instrument to trade ideas and IP rights. Platforms like Opensea, Mintable and MintBase offer NFT minting workflows to let inventors convert their ideas and designs into a tradable digital asset. Minting is the process of creating and validating a data-block that contains the trade secret, idea or design on a blockchain. The process runs blockchain protocol(s) to store, encrypt and setup trading rules and royalties. Once minting is completed, the owner of the NFT can offer it for sale in exchange markets and make start monetizing.

Opportunities and Challenges

While blockchain offers the first opportunity in history to create a thriving idea-driven economy, it certainly still have to answer some of the main challenges facing the rise of idea-driven economy.

How to verify that an idea does in fact embody value? How to make sure that an idea is unique? How to make exchange contracts legally binding and enforceable nationally and globally?

It is certain that creative use-case scenarios and dynamic tokenomics can partially answer some of these questions. The XCAD Token project is an excellent example for how creative use-case scenarios can bypass some of these challenges and transform the classic ad-revenue monetization of media creation to a full idea-driven economy. Their platform generates value for ideas (in the form of videos) based on the dynamic interaction of viewers (audience / potential buyers) with the idea/content. Using privacy controls and NFT smart contracts, ideas and designs for VR apps and motion graphics can be easily offered for sale as trade secrets on this platform.

However, some challenges will require more than use-case scenarios to be resolved. Some technologies like text mining and deep learning will be necessary to establish uniqueness of an idea before having it minted on the blockchain. Human participation will definitely be required to establish value benchmark for ideas according to their addressable markets.

Our generation is witnessing the rise of idea-driven economy. It is our fate to live unprecedented challenges in human history such as climate change, pandemics and natural resources depletion. It is our responsibility, therefore, to ensure that it is the beginning of a better future, rather than allowing it to be the end of a great past.

-Sell me this idea! — It’s NFT!

“I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system.” — Sydney Brenner CH FRS FMedSci MAE, 2002 Noble Laureate

Everyone in academia has experienced the peer-review crisis at some level and magnitude. Who hasn’t waited for months to receive an unjustified rejection or poorly devised review report? Who hasn’t come across biased and uneven peer-review favoring a specific paradigm or theory? For those who didn’t, this 3 minutes video explains its essentials!

Researchers in science, technology and medicine (STM) publish more than 2.5 million peer-reviewed papers a year. Google scholar indexes somewhat over 160 million papers to date. The largest global peer-review survey revealed that researches spent 68.5 million hours on peer-review in 2017. This means that every year, there’s more than 8,000 years of cumulative review-time are required!

Approximately 10% of the reviewers are responsible for 50% of the reviews. More than 70% of reviewers often decline peer-review requests because the article is outside their area of expertise while 42% of researchers decline review requests because they are too busy. Peer review is at large inefficient, too slow and most of the time obscured and in many situations is misguiding.

The $27 billion STM scholarly publishing industry is in indeed the pillar of science R&D in so many ways. Peer-reviewed publishing has no alternative to serve evidence-based science and the progress of collective human knowledge in all fields of knowledge governed by the scientific method.

The question posed by the peer-review crisis is a question of how to fix it, and what will it take to do so! It is never, in any way, a question of its necessity and vitality for the progress of science! After all, without peer-review what science is left to trust?!

To fix peer-review, the entire ecosystem should be democratized. The process must be smart, transparent, authenticated and rewarding for all stakeholders; from universities and funding institutions to authors, reviewers and editors and the scientific community at large. Peer-review, in short, needs to be reinvented.

Blockchain, particularly through tokenization, has the power to the resolve peer-review crisis intuitively and seamlessly. Blockchain technology offers a decentralized ledger to keep track-records of peer-review and offer solutions to copyright infringement, IP protection, plagiarism, citation analytics and conflict of interest. All these aspects related to peer-review are now being approached using non-standard protocols on conventional databases hosted by different publishers.

Tokenization offers a way to democratize peer-review and turn it to an incentive-driven protocol for all stakeholders: authors, reviewers, editors, publishers, universities and R&D funding institutions. However, since peer-reviewed publishing cycle involves numerous roles and scenarios, the use-case scenarios and tokenomics have to be carefully co-designed to ensure that the system always favors good scientific practices such as transparency, reproducibility, authenticity and fairness.

Incentivizing peer-review to improve speed and accuracy

Tokenization offers an incentivizing mechanism to reward reviewers for carrying out peer-review assignments quickly and accurately. Editors and copy-editors can also be rewarded for their roles in managing different stages of the review process in a way that favors publishing cycle efficiency.

Token Curated Registries (TCRs) to automate editorial policies

A token curated registry is merely a list in its simplest definition. Being part of the blockchain, a TCR is a maintained in a decentralized manner by token holders who have an incentive to do so. In a TCR-based peer-review system, the token holders (editors) have scientific incentive to maintain a high quality list which contains submitted paper that deserve to be peer-reviewed. In other words, TCRs can automate journal editorial policies and save thousands of hours wasted annually by editors to decide weather of not to review submitted manuscripts.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for IP and copyright protection

Each and every scholarly article is associated with some sort of intellectual property (IP) and copyright. NFTs provide an ideal toolset to protect IP and grant copyright license for peer-reviewed articles. The use of NFTs would not only resolve exhaustive and expensive IP conflicts often associated with early-stage research, but it will also let authors share the rewards of copyright licensing with publishers for the first time.

Are we going to see a tokenized peer-review system soon?

There have been a number of attempts to tokenize parts of the peer-review publishing cycle. These attempts include Principia Network, Decentralized Science, and PaperScore. However, until today, there is no complete solution that sets peer-review on a full-scale tokenization evolutionary path yet, and most probably it will not be there anytime soon. With the major players of the journal publishing industry being skeptical and conservative about the ground-breaking technology, a complete solution might carry enormous potential and sound risk making it a challenging achievement.