In this post I'm going to discuss what I think is one of the main reasons why I want Tauchain to exist. This is a reason I think many or perhaps most people can relate to. It starts with the question of how can we save our own lives using our own effort? It evolves into the question of how can we save lives in general by augmenting our efforts as much as technologically feasible?
1 out of 2 (around 50%) will be diagnosed with invasive cancer
The current statistics reveal that the highest scale we have a 50% chance of developing cancer in our life time. This can be lower according to some recent statistics (closer to 30% or in some cases 40% but still this is very high). The fact is if we are each in a room then about 1 out of every 3 of us in the best case will get cancer someday. And 100% of us will know someone who has cancer someday. So there is a very high chance that someone we care about a lot will develop cancer and do we want to be in a position where we didn't do all we could to have a capability of saving their life? It could even be you who developers cancer and would you want to be in the position where you can say you dedicated some of your resources toward finding a cure?
Cancer is one of those global problems that most human beings want to eradicate. It is not politically controversial to want to cure cancer. It is also something that Tauchain can help with because using Tauchain we can scale discussions, define problems in a precise manner, and most importantly leverage the market. The ability to create markets which are smart (meaning which can adapt to regulatory obstacles) is a potentially unique feature of Tauchain.
Some might say that there are already pharmaceutical companies trying to cure cancer or develop anti-aging treatments. Indeed this is true there are these companies. The problem right now is these companies do not have the new business models which Tauchain might make possible. First is the fact that using an ICO you can let future patients/customers own shares in the company. This allows companies which want to create cures to have the potential to raise billions of dollars necessary to do expensive trials. In addition the ability to do research may improve due to the features of Tauchain as well so that it is cheaper to search for new potential drugs or supplements.
The human genome is very complicated and is an area we know very little about. Cancer is also something we have to study. One example of an approach to defeating cancer is immunotherapy but this again is going to require a lot of research into how to reprogram the immune system to identify and destroy cancer. If everyone can help or contribute in some way to the process then it makes the process much cheaper than it is right now which means the drug or treatment can potentially be cheaper due to lower R&D cost.
Most people want to live long and healthy lives but we still know very little
We know very little about aging. We do have some theories as to what causes aging. We even have some theories on how to slow it down. But we don't understand the mechanism well enough yet to develop a treatment. By aging I'm referring to the process by which cellular function deteriorates over time. We know for example the risk of getting cancer increases with age. But we still are working on the means of developing biomarkers to even determine the age of a person.
What if we could leverage the potential of Tauchain to discover more about the aging process? What if we could develop an anti aging pill or treatment which we could collaboratively develop and own? What if we could make a profit from every pill sold via tokenization? If this sounds good to you then it might sound good to millions of others who could be encouraged to participate in an ICO to develop a pill to slow or supplement the aging process.
The ethical and rational argument
Some people could say that to put an emphasis on saving lives is to seek to do the greatest good for the greatest number. This emphasis could put Tauchain on a fast track to mainstream adoption because utility would be measured in not just how profitable it is to hold a token but in the potential lives that could be saved. To profit from saving lives is an ethical and rational argument. To align the profit motive with saving as many lives as possible is an easy ethical (and rational) argument to make. People who value life will value any technology which saves lives.
Some projects exist which I will list below that already are trying to save lives or end aging. These projects did ICOs over Ethereum and so they currently are Ethereum focused. That being said there is the possibility that some projects could still leverage Tauchain regardless of whether they originally launched on Ethereum. It is also possible that new projects can launch on Tauchain to attempt the same or similar objectives.
- http://youthereum.io/
- https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2017/10/an-interview-with-yuri-deigin-of-youthereum-genetics-the-merging-of-an-initial-coin-offering-and-pluripotency-factors/
- http://eng.openlongevity.org/
- https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2017/09/open-longevity-is-attempting-the-ico-route-for-fundraising/
- https://luvenmed.io/
What can Tauchain do?
- TML can translate languages so that we can more effectively communicate and collaborate with each other and to machines.
- Tauchain is decentralized with the potential to remove politics as a barrier to progress. If it saves lives then people will be motivated to do it even if government officials are suicidal.
- Agoras allows for markets. These markets include a market for computational resources to allow for massive distributed computing networks. It also allows for knowledge markets as well.
- Tauchain can leverage machine intelligence (in particular symbolic AI) to help make the process of doing research much easier. We can avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.
References
Grunau, G. L., Gueron, S., Pornov, B., & Linn, S. (2018). The Risk of Cancer Might be Lower Than We Think. Alternatives to Lifetime Risk Estimates. Rambam Maimonides medical journal, 9(1).