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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2975 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 8, 2024

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Is there some clever way that someone could make blockchain insurance? Like, a decentralized, transparent, nonprofit system where everyone pools money (probably in the form of some cryptocurrency) together, and then when someone makes a claim there's an algorithm to decide whether it's legitimate and how much money it should pay out (possibly variable depending on how much free money is in the system due to the frequency of past claims).

Legally and practically I don't think you could do this with health insurance due to patient confidentiality issues. But maybe for auto-insurance or homeowners insurance or something? Or if there's a mechanism to anonymize medical records prior to submission. And I've pretty much handwaved away the hard part which would be deciding which claims are legitimate to prevent bad-faith exploitation. But is that solvable? And would this actually be usable if it worked? The goal would be to remove the profit motive from insurance companies taking a cut as middlemen, as well as the adversarial relationship between them and both healthcare providers and patients. I suppose a mostly traditionally run but non-profit insurance company would have some of the benefits, but even those have some potential for corruption, and I'm wondering if a transparent and user-run blockchain thing would clear that.

where everyone pools money

there's an algorithm to decide whether it's legitimate and how much money it should pay out

I think we can take out the blockchain and focus on two pretty load-bearing elements of this scheme: you want to automate insurance underwriting and claims adjustment.

Both are possible (and interesting) in idealized conditions (i.e. derivative markets), but completely non-trivial in all real-world insurance markets. This "algorithm" would probably be considered at least weak AGI.

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