ScientificCoin (science + blockchain) (crowdfunding, education, freelancing) review inspired by “Star Wars” (+ video-version). The most realistic “game” for everyone
I believe that ScientificCoin has a potential to become one of the best dApps.
I guess that calling something “the best” is quite subjective and depends on the one’s experience, interests etc.
I want to present (subjectively) criteria that I believe the dApp should meet to be the best.
It should
- allow people to use their time effectively to solve important problems (and not to “kill” their time);
- be unique;
- be open source (ideally with the code placed on GitHub), so that the world community of programmers and other specialists (like translators…) could easily contribute;
- be led by the team of experienced professionals;
- be open for a wide audience (ideally, all people all over the world);
- use innovative technologies to minimize the impact of the blockchain technology usage (like excessive usage of electricity);
- have a positive impact on our society and environment;
- have a good performance and User experience (UX);
In a nutshell,
ScientificCoin = science + blockchain
There’s a number of problems in today’s science, namely:
1/. Funding of scientific projects/monetization of the skills provided by scientists;
2/. Access to knowledge/information;
a) “lost” science. “Lost” because of language barrier. Not all articles/papers are accessible in English (the lingua franca of science);
b) “hidden” science. A lot of papers/articles are “hidden” behind the expensive paywalls;
3/. Publishing. Some articles (even those worth the Nobel Prize like this article on graphene) aren’t published because of inadequate peer review process.
Take for example this article on graphene. It was rejected twice and took at least 1 year to get published. And then, in 2010, went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics.
[Open Science can save the planet | Kamila MARKRAM | TEDxBrussels]
4/. Collaboration;
Not only scientists could use GitHub-like platform for collaboration and making scientific data open to everyone, but they could probably set sort of bounties to complete some tasks/run experiments which they couldn’t do/run themselves (because of lack of appropriate equipment/materials).
5/. Education;
Initiatives like MOOC (Massive online open courses) try to make education available for free for everyone.
To get more information about the problems (and their blockchain-based (and non-blockchain-based) solutions) you can read my posts:
Blockchain-Based Scientific Ecosystem (dExperiment is coming). General overview
And ScientificCoin tries to solve some of these problems.
In order to help you to understand and remember what ScientificCoin project is about, I’d like to provide an analogy based on the scenes of “Star Wars” series of films. It’s going to be kind of usage of mnemotechnics technique.
For the uninitiated, the basic idea of classical mnemotechnics is to encode information into images and place them into locations (that's why it's also called The Method of loci (the plural of locus)).
The idea might seem crazy, but a lot will start make sense towards the end of the post.
Well, obviously, “Star Wars” wasn’t initially designed to encode information about ScientificCoin project, so not everything about ScientificCoin will fit perfectly into “Star Wars” scenes.
However, it fits pretty well for this purpose.
Okay, let’s get started.
There’re 3 pillars of ScientificCoin project:
- Crowdfunding platform;
- Freelancing platform for scientists;
- Monsterbrain (educational platform);
Note that ScientificCoin project is the work in progress. They haven’t developed all the features yet, but they have something to show you already. And ScientificCoin indeed is going to be a dApp with open source code published on GitHub (I asked this on their Telegram group).
What’s more, they have already 1 successfully funded project.
HealthMonitor (I’ll talk about it later).
1. The main problem ScientificCoin currently is trying to solve is fundraising/crowdfunding with the help of their crowdfunding platform
Here you can think about ScientificCoin project as Kickcstarter, but exclusively for scientific projects.
There’re 2 parties:
a) scientists with ideas, who need advertisement for their ideas/projects;
b) investors with $, who need a way to minimize the risks for their investments / a reliable way of scientific projects evaluation;
And ScientificCoin project is trying to provide both parties what they need – a platform for scientists to easily advertise their projects and for investors to provide them sort of rating of scientific projects.
The rating is determined based on 2 methods:
a) mathematical algorithm;
b) the wisdom of the crowd (the latter includes as people with scientific background, as people without it);
Now, let’s try to use “Star Wars” analogy to better understand/remember all this.
First of all, we need a scientific project (which in our case is going to be Anakin Skywalker).
And we have Jedi (scientists who a trying to bring the project to life; is our case it is Qui-Gon Jinn).
In our case, Anakin Skyworker (scientific project) needs some equipment (like a lightsaber (energy sword), cloth, etc.) from the investors of the Galactic Republic to be trained and become a Padawan.
In the contest of this post I'd like to encode investors into Senators of Galactic Republic
like the Queen Padmé Amidala of Naboo.
First of all, projects creators have to fill a form. Information provided there will be used for mathematical algorithm evaluation.
You can find out how it looks like here (scroll down).
There're dozens of fields there you need to fill.
The project should be evaluated in order to get financing from investors. This happens in 2 stages:
a) mathematical algorithm;
In our case it’s The Force.
In the film it’s used for the things like reading thoughts, evaluating a person, moving objects etc.
ScientificCoin mathematical algorithm judges the projects based on near 70 different parameters of 5 categories [1].
Once the project gets evaluated by the algorithm, it gets a score
b) “the wisdom of the crowd”
In our case it’s the Jedi Council
with a group of creatures (including humans) evaluating whether or not a newcomer can be trained by the Jedi (scientist)/have a potential to be successful.
Note that the projects evaluation happens on ScientificCoin not just by people with scientific background.
People with different background can participate. This allows to evaluate the project from various perspectives and achieve the best results.
ScientificCoin will have a social platform for all these people with traditional social media platforms features.
According to the information found in the ScientificCoin project videos on YouTube, there were near 120,000 users already on the platform in November, 2019 with 1000+ scientists/students with different scientific degrees.
Once the project gets evaluated by the crowd, it gets a second score. And the final score is determined based on these 2 scores.
This is how we get a rating for all the projects listed on [ScientificCoin crowdfunding platform].
You can click on the records in the table to see the details about every project including information about its creators, FAQs etc.
Right now there’re 101 project. 11 of them passed experts evaluation.
The projects evaluated by the algorithm are highlighted in red, while the projects evaluated by experts are highlighted in green.
Own tokens and smart contracts
With the help of ScientificCoin platform people can create their own tokens, smart contracts (no need to be an IT professional) based on the Ethereum blockchain (ScientificCoin team plans to create their own blockchain in the future), and begin to search for funds/investors. They can do so after the evaluation of their projects once they feel like they have enough feedback and followers [1].
Fundraising takes place in US dollars, Euros or other popular currency. In the presence of a smart contract, most popular cryptocurrencies can be used as a payment instrument. All funds go directly to the bank account belonging to the scientific project.
[source]
This process resembles me a little Steem SMTs (Smart Media Tokens) which will help people to create their own tokens to monetize their web-site and more.
Note that the Jedi Council is located in the Council Tower (analogy for the ScientificCoin crowdfunding platform).
And at the end we can have a successfully funded project (Anakin Skywalker / Healthmonitor).
To join the platform, visit http://scientificcoin.com/
Once you’re there, you get 3 SNcoins for free.
2. Freelancing platform
Aside from raising funds for scientific projects, ScientificCoin can help with monetization of the skills provided by scientists.
The platform should be found here https://hireascientist.com
As I mentioned, to be the best a dApp also should have a good User experience (UX) and performance.
That’s where ScientificCoin platform has some problems.
Currently we just can’t get access to the freelancing platform.
It shows “Error code: SEC_ERROR_EXPIRED_CERTIFICATE”
As I mentioned, ScientificCoin is the work in progress.
So, I hope they will fix it soon.
I suspect that ScientificCoin Freelancing platform should be similar to ResearchGate
which serves as kind of social network for scientists and allows clients to hire qualified experts in any field [2].
As for our analogy with the “Star Wars” film, the Jedi movement originates from the Tython planet [3].
There was a Jedi community on the planet.
Just like that, ScientificCoin provides a freelancing platform (Tython) for scientists.
3. Monsterbrain (educational platform)
Well, this is going to be sort of MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform like edX, where tutors
will provide educational materials for students. All of them will have a chance to get rewards in the form of SNcoin (ScientificCoin token).
MonsterBrain is an opportunity not only to become smarter, but also to earn on it.
(source)
At first, you’ll need to pass a questionnaire with free-form answers.
Go to https://scientificcoin.com/monsterbrain and click “Get free coin” button or scroll down and click “First forms” button. And they everything is pretty much intuitive.
In the quiz you’ll see mostly questions in the field of economics like
(image source (during questionnaire ))
After the analysis of your answers you’ll be given the corresponding training program.
What’s more,
You can win not only intellectual gifts in the form of training courses and subscriptions for weekly trainings from developers of the Technopark. The best guys can spend their holidays in the educational centers of Europe: England, Italy, France, Germany.
and
You can win interactive training from Doctors of all sorts of disciplines or even learn from them personally during a month!
(source)
Initiatives like MOOC provides us a chance to get education on our own schedule for free.
Well, I don’t know what is going to happen and what you’ll see once you get the results of the quiz.
I’m yet to pass it myself.
As for our analogy with the “Star Wars” film, Jedi like Luke Skywalker
were initially trained outside of traditional schools (actually I’m not sure they existed in the context of the film) with other Jedi (tutors).
The team
The idea of ScientificCoin project came from the scientists from Siberia (Russia), which had difficulties with funding their own project one day.
All the team members are well-known scientists.
To get more information, visit http://scientificcoin.com/ (scroll down)
ScientificCoin is based in the heart of Silicon Valley. And
Scientific Coin Inc. is a parent company which has subsidiaries in Switzerland - an authorized cryptocurrency company, and Russia - the creator of the software, mathematical algorithms and other intellectual property.
(source)
And finally, Galactic Republic symbolizes ScientificCoin ecosystem
.jpg)
I hope you liked the approach I used here to provide you information about ScientificCoin project (encoding information about it into the scenes of “Star Wars” trying to find similarities/analogies between them) which meets all the criteria (well, at this stage it meets almost all criteria. They need to solve some problems (and improve) their websites) I specified at the beginning of the post.
ScientificCoin is unique in that it not only gives us a chance to make the world around us better, but there was no ICO.
The project was funded by venture funds (and probably, founders/team members).
I assume that the absence of ICO could probably help the project to grow more organically and reduce the chance for some scams.
Feel free to share your thoughts on this.
In order to minimize the environmental impact related to the usage of the blockchain, ScientificCoin uses
Proof-of-research technology in our unique version. The extraction of Scientificcoin does not require a senseless waste of electricity. We will use the well-known technology https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ for reward for mining.
(source)
a proof-of-research scheme, which rewards miners who perform computations on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) [12]. The computation for the consensus protocol is used for scientific computations, so the energy is used for very meaningful purposes
(source)
According to the information found on the platform and in their Telegram group, the platform is currently in beta and the launch will be in 2020/once they have 1 million users and token holders.
For that to happen, they provide kind of bounty program for users, where you need to spread the word about the project and bring more users to it.
For more information about the bounty, read https://scientificcoin.io/account/bonus
Note that once you referred 10,000 users, you can get a $ 5,570 Health Monitor device for free [5].
Plus, if you found 20+ buyers of the device, then you could
get one Health Monitor device (or 10% of the commission from $ 5570 - device price) for every 10 devices supplied under the contract.
source
For more information, visit
https://scientificcoin.io/account/referrals
FAQs regarding the project can be found here
http://scientificcoin.com/faq
As it was mentioned at the beginning, ScientificCoin addresses only some of the problems of today’s science. Personally, I hope they will try to solve all the problems (including publishing and collaboration problems), and possibly it will evolve into something bigger with GitHub-like platform for scientists to collaborate and publishing mechanism with fair/adequate peer review process or even dExperiment.
I’ve tried to talk about all this in my post here
Blockchain-Based Scientific Ecosystem (dExperiment is coming). General overview
and would be great if ScientificCoin also tried to solve “lost” science/funds problem (“lost” because of language barrier).
I’ve tried to discuss this in my post called
"Blockchain-Based Scientific Ecosystem (dExperiment is coming). General overview" and would be great if ScientificCoin also tried to solve “lost” science/funds problem (“lost” because of language barrier).
I’ve tried to discuss this in my post called
TranslateMe (or Decentralization meets Translation industry). Part 2. The “missing puzzle piece” of scientific ecosystem. General overview
And, finally, I decided to call ScientificCoin the most realistic “game“, because it’s science which is closer to reality. You see, we have receptors which allow us to perceive the world around us.
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Scientific devices/tools help us to extend our capabilities and approach reality.
And the good news is that this “game” is for everyone. Everyone can make a difference.
The more scientific knowledge we have, the more realistic point of view we have, which is a good thing, because it’ll help us to make more rational decisions and be more creative when it comes to problem solving.
Here's the video-version of my post
(Note that the video-review is actually 27 minutes long. Seems like there was en error and the video repeats again after 27 minutes)
(Corrections:
- 20:50. there're 120,000 users on ScientificCoin, not 120 as I said on that time
- 16:10. The planet is actually called Tython and looks differently. Updated in the post. I figured our this later)
I’d like to say that ScientificCoin provides sort of additional purpose for our life which is making the world around us better from the scientific (the most realistic) point of view.
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References
Scientificcoin official websites:
Crowdfunding platform
https://scientificcoin.io/
Hireascientist
https://hireascientist.com/
Monsterbrain
https://scientificcoin.com/monsterbrain
All images (without the license specified + those from the film)/videos are used under the doctrine known in USA as "Fair Use" (similar doctrines are used in other countries). For more information visit the US Gov website
What do you think about ScientificCoin scientific ecosystem?
Feel free to share your thoughts.
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