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Tim's avatar

Great piece! In the future I'd love to read a follow-up on how organizations have made progress. Also curious how this translates to improving other notorious problems in science such as publication bias.

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mattlumpkin's avatar

Thanks so much for this. As an IP wonk and someone interested in quantification of expertise this scratched a lot of my itches. I am still puzzling over one question which is probably just my inexperience with crypto. You write:

"Each of these achievements will be tokenized as either fungible or non-fungible tokens. None of the tokens will have any monetary value or be tradeable at all. They will be desirable for the same reason that a high h-index is desirable, because they are a public display of one’s scientific status."

Do you have in mind a new token protocol other than ERC20 for these fungible but non-transferrable tokens? It's not clear to me how you prevent people from sharing or transferring tokens, or prevent them from becoming valuable to transfer especially if they become the measure of professional status. Similarly, with NFT's, under current protocols they are owned by the person who mints them, so what do you have in mind to prevent sale / transfer? A cultural fix? Or do you have in mind the present ownership of the tokens not being the source of the status, and rather a method that references the initial transfer of the tokens to the academic on the blockchain as the source of the status calculation?

Forgive me if I'm pressing further than you're intending to go here. I'm just super interested in your proposal and the way you've laid it out. Thanks!

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