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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.
That's how somebody breaks in and drains the system. They figure how to produce plausible claims and clean you out.
So, you create the system where nobody (human) has an incentive to keep it running well (even if you're a subscriber, if the system collapses you could just move your monthly premium payment to another system, so your loss is microscopic) but a lot of humans have a big incentive to break it. How long do you think such system will stand?
This whole "profit motive is bad" thing is stupid. Profit motive is the only thing that makes people design resilient systems. Well, maybe some people have huge egos and want to design systems just to stroke it and become even more narcissistic. But there's not a lot of people which are both this way and actually smart, and most of them will run out of steam eventually. Usually it's some kind of material motive involved. It doesn't have to be cash - could be other benefits, such as fame, power, recognition, etc. But money has been invented for a reason - it's the easiest way to incentivize people. If you start with excluding it, you probably will lose to people who do not.
What kind of corruption are you fighting? Failing to pay out valid claims? But somebody would have to code which claims are valid, how would you ensure that person (or sets of persons) are not playing the system? Syphoning funds out of insurance pool into different investments and losing it? IIRC this is already pretty illegal for an insurance business, and usually not the first worry if you're dealing with a respectable provider. Obstructing your claims with bad service and arcane rules? Not sure how making it automatic would make it easier - AI chat bot can give you a run-around no less than a human can. Misleading people about what the rules are coming it, and then it's too late to complain when they already paid? Blockchain is an ideal vehicle for this kind of fraud, see a myriad of rugpull schemes around, with new ones born (and die) every day.
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