I told you (in future) a story on how I lost the opportunity of a lifetime to fear and overthinking. After grieving the blunder and much thought, I have come to the conclusion that cryptocurrency is useless for everything except tracking people and conning people and warming our planet and wasting brilliant people's time and making people poor.
If you think I am that rabbit which failed to reach the grapes and said it is sour, you can go eat pellets. Satisfied? Let us continue.
The academic world has been hijacked by the chief demon of capitalism which eats humanity's creative and intellectual output and swallows it, only letting humanity through its mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth called the courts and hackers and only prevented from crushing and grinding us by being given droplets of demon sweat - money - which to us is almost like honey.
The result of this is large-scale ignorance and stunted innovation.
As these authors have noted, we as human beings stand to lose everything that is valuable to us through this loss of knowledge.
While there is a definite moral debate regarding using people's work which you have not paid for to make money, and the obvious right of the worker to his wages (Jesus) I would like to note that making money from nothing is an especial talent of the best capitalists and bankers.
I think the reason these academic publishers have been so successful is their foresight and aggression in taking advantage of the internet in its infancy to build the infrastructure that enables them to make people pay for this content before most public libraries even thought of or moved to create their websites.
That is the possible mechanism by which a lot of academic and scientific research - a lot of which is funded by taxpayers' money - is now in the hands of private individuals.
Had these libraries or the government been wise enough, they would have created a network of library databases through which any affiliate library, institution or individual would have got access to books, periodicals and other research for small money or none at all.
Individual libraries would host their works themselves then share them with others over the network. This adds little extra cost to modern internet-connected academic libraries. That is the only way cryptocurrency or the blockchain can help the world.
What is more likely to happen, however, is governments might end up using variations of cryptocurrency called CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) to keep track of and control their citizens, because why not? Cryptocurrencies use public ledgers which means everything you do can be seen except we do not know who you are because we cannot yet decrypt your identities but once we do, damn!
Anyway, nothing prevents a blockchain from being made using unique customer details which can be reverse-engineered, for example sequential ID numbers used to generate hashes which can then be easily computed or guessed because at the end of the day, the government is not your friend.
In fact, we can also use the blockchain to secure government information infrastructure from hackers and unforeseen events by ensuring redundancy, consistency, integrity and reliability of the data we put into it. This is important especially in a country like mine which depends on Indians and other foreign entities to manage our data infrastructure.