There is a huge economical interest in bitcoins. And reading a bit more about the blockchain technology behind, I expect that scientific data will soon move towards the same path as soon as we drop Nature, Science and many more journals as gatekeepers
A block chain or blockchain is a permissionless distributed database based on a protocol that maintains a continuously growing list of data records hardened against tampering and revision, even by its operators. The initial and most widely known application of block chain technology is the public ledger of transactions for bitcoin,which has been the inspiration for similar implementations often known as altchains.
Although people are talking so much about releasing study data into the public domain – allowing reviewers to test central claims of a paper – there is no progress at all. Even being part of an EU funded collaborative study, I could never get the full data set.
Maybe it isn’t block chain alone – it may be also cooperative storage cloud as in the following video example.
Added 31 Dec 2016: Blockchain started back in Jan 2009, occupies currently 105 GB and is distributed among 5400 nodes. Zündfunk (in German) has a nice feature about the blockchain referring mainly to the “Blockchain Revolution“, a new book by Don and Alex Tapscott.