Louis Pasteur, renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination

I am a Bitcoin Maximalist but I am not a Bitcoin Supremacist. This means that I value Bitcoin as much as Bitcoin Maximalists but my understanding of what blockchain means for our civilization lets me envision other use cases beyond Bitcoin. I think blockchain revolution will be ruled by few neutral protocols that answer to critical civilization issues. Of course there will be companies built on top of these protocols but the number of such protocols will be very limited.

Three days ago I deployed Etica to the ethereum blockchain. After more than a year of development, this protocol is now implemented and running on the ethereum mainnet.

In this article I will explain some of the reasons why I think Etica will be a game changer and could revolutionize the way we produce medicines. It is not an explanation of the protocol, I encourage any person that wants to understand this protocol to have a look at the whitepaper. It is the best way to get a clear and concise explanation of the Etica system. Whitepaper available at: https://www.etica-protocol.org/viewwhitepaper

I. Questioning the current intellectual property model

Etica questions the current model of intellectual property in medical research. As any project that aims to become a major project of next decades, Etica tackles a pricky and significant issue which is intellectual property in medical research. The pharmaceutical industry is the second biggest if not the biggest industry after the banks. Bitcoin has been up to now the ultimate use case for blockchain. I believe that Etica can evolve into the second major neutral protocol for our civilization. Bitcoin has become our type 1 civilization currency, Etica aims to become our type 1 civilization neutral protocol for medical research, removing the need for intellectual property.

II. Potentially revolutionizing research beyond expectations

Today the idea we have of medical research is vague. Most of the time people have in mind these billions of dollar invested. As a consequence they think our civilization is ruthless with diseases and everything necessary is being made to cure diseases. The reality is far different from this.

The current system is extremly inefficient. You have to understand that when we say billions of dollars are invested in research at the end we are talking about small teams of 15 people on average working on a disease. These teams do not work together but in competition meaning they do not share their results and they reproduce the work that other teams have already done. It is a race to patent based on the intellectual property system. When one of these teams finally wins the race after more than a decade of inefficient research, the company gets the right to do whatever it wants with the price for a long time.

After talking with experts of this field one of their main challenge is to recruit people with inter-disciplinary skills. At the same time the unemployment rates after graduating with a PhD is 40% for life science discipline [1]. This shows that the resources are there but the system is not able to maximize them. I am not talking about completely replacing but at least giving an alternative by sending an army of people researching and sharing their results instead of few experts.

What if all these PhDs did not have to engage in networking and other activities to get involved in research. But all they have to do is connect to a neutral protocol, identify a disease, start researching and get financially rewarded in days. Beyond these PHDs, people from all disciplines could connect and contribute, a true game changer when we know the lack of interdisciplinary skills of the current system.

Remember how the space industry was before Elon Musk launched SpaceX. It really looked like the current medical research system. Very closed system, the knowledge was spread among small groups of experts with few interdisciplinary skills. It was deemed as insane to try to enter the system as a none expert. But Elon Musk did start and his reusable launch system is now the best of the world. How many diseases are in this situation where people from other fields could propose unconventional solutions if the problem was presented to them but they were never informed and connected to the issue ?

III. Neutral Protocol and Open source

In addition Etica is open source. Actually it has been open source even before the deployment to mainnet. The smart contract has been open source since 17 october 2019 and is available at github.com/etica/etica. I spent more than a year developping this smart contract, and I am very glad to now see it running. If you are an ethereum developper, have a look at the code. I commented the code so that any developper can easily understand and review the smart contract. Nonetheless it is a complex smart contract and its size is just under the current max bytecode size allowed by ethereum.

IV. Beyond Ethereum scaling issues

Although initially deployed on Ethereum, Etica success is not bound to ethereum success. If it happens to be necessary Etica could operate on its own by for instance forking ethereum. In fact the use case is so important that it is not insane to imagine an ethereum proof of work chain devoted to Etica. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t really pay attention to ethereum current scaling challenges. In last resort Etica could fork and create its own ethereum proof of work chain due to the significant potential outcomes put at stake by its use case.

V. Fair launch

No ICO, no premine, or anything like that. Etica aims to achieve the fairest coin distribution in crypto currency history with a disribution process that will take about 10 years.

Even if with praise their decentralisation, both Ethereum and Bitcoin initial distribution could be questionned. In fact Ethereum had a 60 million ETH premine for the ICO and a 12 million ETH premine for the devs this could represent up to 17% of Ethereum supply. On the other hand bitcoin has distributed all its supply through mining but its extreme deflationnary model has given first adopters the whip hand over the bitcoin supply. Addresses with more than 100 bitcoin control more than 61.38% of the supply. That number goes to 84.89% if we count addresses with more than 10 bitcoins. Etica cannot aford this kind of whale supremacy because the coins can be used to vote, and such distribution discrepancy would make the Etica reward system irrelevant.

As a consequence Etica distribution will partially be done through mining but with a constant issuance of about 2 100 000 ETI issued per year during 10 years. This way early adopters will still have an advantage as fewer people will be mining at first but this advantage will not be disproportionate. The other part of Etica inssuance is devoted to the protocol reward.

Anyone can start mining Eticas. The initial difficulty was set to a discent level so that it takes about ten minutes for each block right from the begining. Other people have started to mine intermittently as well and I expect we will be much more by the end of this year.

VI. A long journey but significant outcomes

Don’t make me wrong having a smart contract operational and able to handle everything mentioned in the whitepaper is a major milestone and required a lot of work. But now we need to build much more. People are just starting to discover Etica the same way they discovered Bitcoin ten years ago. When Bitcoin started the first people that joined the momentum were the people that knew enough about the central banks issue. Today the central banks monetary system is almost mainstream. At contrary the intellectual property dilemma of medical research is still an issue that the average person does not understand deeply yet. Thus, like bitcoin, the revolution will take time but the first to join and believe in Etica will benefit the most if the protocol succeed.

Conclusion

Etica aims to achieve something huge and is beyond just one individual. Etica has no CEO, and I don’t even consider myself as a founder. I am the initiator of the momentum and if what I described makes sense to you join and build on top of Etica. The ecosystem is brand new and you can have an important role to play in its development. There are a lot of other points I could have mentioned but this was just an introduction and I prefer to be too short rather than too long. I will make other publications on medium about Etica and its advancements. I am contactable on the telegram group: t.me/eticaprotocol

Best regards,

Kevin Wad

[1]: The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/04/bad-job-market-phds/479205/