Blockchain and digital currency and digital academic credits are becoming available to public. What are technological challenges to implement them?

First, I have to thank you for raising this. Trade and education are literally the most critical bottlenecks that, if addressed, humanity's scientific and engineering output increases most.

I have two responses below:

One is a strict response to technologies that you have specifically named.

Another is a broader view from my own perspective, where I attempt to answer a more fundamental that I think will guide us to even better outcomes.

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1. Response Limited to Named Technologies

1.1. Blockchain

While blockchain's computational scalability problem is somewhat addressed (e.g. adoption of PoS than PoW), its space scalability problem is far away from being addressed. This is both, storage space, and bandwidth. This is part of why we will never be able to use today's crypto "currencies" to buy daily items, such as a cup of coffee at a local Starbucks store.

To make cryptocurrencies function as "currencies", we must solve the following problems:

Proofs of coin ownership must be confined in the wallet of the owner, not in the public blockchain.

The global blockchain must contain only minimal data to indicate consensus about transaction orders.

The global blockchain must update minimally and organically. E.g. a person buying a cup of coffee in China should not be heard in USA instantly.

The boundaries must be decided organically and dynamically by the algorithm itself. E.g. we must not have to sit to manually create clusters of trade groups for every reach by hand, as this will be too slow to change in the future, and we will suffer an unnecessary overhead in optimising such cluster boundaries as trade patterns shift.

Ideas that might solve the problems above:

(1) and (2): A promising line of research, that is still not mature enough to the best of my knowledge, involves the use of zero-knowledge proofs. If a space- and time-efficient zero-knowledge proof algorithm is found, then we have solved the first and second problems in the list above.
(3) and (4): I am not aware of any solution that satisfies these requirements yet. However, I'm optimistic that there is an elegant solution by abandoning micromanagement, and letting individuals who are involved in the trades choose the path which their transaction must cross. I am optimistic that it is very doable, that through a set of rules, we can create a system that incentivises individual buyers/sellers to behave in such ways that news about their transactions are not unnecessarily heard of internationally (e.g. a coffee cup purchase in China is not heard in USA, but instead a more aggregate news is heard). I am very optimistic that these can be resolved by a set of simple rules in the currency, and then letting capitalism do its job.

1.2. CredX

Certainly a step forward. To save time, I will not speak about its many advantages which we agree about. I will jump into its disadvantages:

Centralised: What if CredX decides to ban some subjects from being taught? Or even bans some students, or regions, from joining it? For example, while I'm against Putin's aggression on Ukraine, what guarantees us that CredX would not face a scenario where enrolled Russian students suddenly become unable to use it? The moment we have a centralised system, we will run these risks, and since education is so pivotal to humanity's progress, I believe we must never allow our education to be so vulnerable.
Growth is not organic enough: Who approve which courses enter is CredX essentially. Science changes its landscape dynamically, and we must not impose any resistance on how science is shifting its playground. Are today's university course structures, or taxonomy, optimal?

I think the solution is to adopt a distributed system, with a distributed protocol, ideally even anonymous, where individuals conduct research in a peer-to-peer manner.

I have written a discussion post here with details about this thought concerning the academic peer-review system, however it probably also applies to education in general, as paper acceptance can be viewed as passing a course (e.g. passing a course can be viewed by getting acceptance by enough credible peers in a web-of-trust network).

https://www.researchgate.net/post/A_Web_of_Trust-based_System_for_Peer-reviewing_Academic_Papers_A_Proposal

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2. Broad Response from my View

2.1. Today's Education Problem

Today's educational system, starting from school, is based on a factory-like production pipe-line that students enter from one end of the pipe, and exit from the other end of the pipe, supposedly equipped with enough prerequisites to go on with their life as humans to supposedly build a better future. Within this pipeline, the students are given courses as "boxes" and subjects, where they learn them and pass them "atomically".

I claim this is very wrong, and eventually causes individuals with different interests to unnecessarily spend their time facing subjects that do not interest them, and do not plan to use them in the future. As a result, we effectively kill the love of science and education in these individuals.

Sadly, at the end of this production pipeline is a sad reality where you hear statements from those who have exited it "I hate mathematics/physics/etc". This is very sad, as we were all born as scientists, loving to experiment with the physics of this universe (this is why a child is so excited when playing with, say, balls) and to use logic to solve the puzzles (mathematics).

2.2. How Education Should Be

Education should be purely research-oriented, based on the interests of an individual, with a smooth seamless transition from early steps that we take as children, until the later steps that we take as grown scientists.

To be specific, I propose this educational style:

An individual (could be a child, an adult, etc, age is not important) enters an educational institution, and sees the wide spectrum that possible outcomes that science and achieve (e.g. robotics, rockets, algorithms, etc).

The individual chooses the projects that he/she wants to work on based on what seems most fun to them. We can rename such educational institutions into "Fun Parks", because it is really meant to be enjoyed, and we -humans- have evolved to love science. So nature has done a great job to make sure that we are born as scientists.

Mentors will guide the students on the path that they should follow to achieve their goals, and help them to find out intermediate steps (or sub-goals) to help them with their journey to eventually reach their end goals.

A student could have multiple goals, and they may choose so. A student could multi-task and jiggle between different goals and sub-goals as they enjoy most. We must let individuals have fun in their own unique way, in the most flexible form possible. This freedom will allow individuals to explore the space of scientific discoveries and inventions most broadly, and hopefully result in more scientific and engineering progress overall.

Such education institutions (or fun parks), must have an element of rewards. For example, at the end of each year (or any other period depending on how it works best), there has to be a party where teams from all generations demonstrate their projects publicly, in a fun competition with rewards from sponsors (e.g. monetary rewards from governments, companies, etc). This element is very critical in order to re-energise students that are early in their path: to be re-excited again about what is ahead, and how doable it is.

The steps (1) to (5) are repeated as one finds it "fun".

As you see, there is no rigid production pipeline here, but rather a messy mesh of threads chosen by each individual as he or she likes. You will not see a person being forced to, say, learn or memorise theorems in a mathematics course in order to "pass", as this will make them hate science. Instead, students will see paths leading to goals, so that the students will know why they have to learn what (just like the fun path chosen by scientists).

All of the steps above can be done physically in a building, or digitally behind a website, depending on the subjects, and depending on what works best. Technologically, it will most likely deploy the Web-of-Trust idea I linked above as well as one of its components. However, it will also require some physical buildings as there are many branches of science that have physical requirements.

There is no distinction between "school" or "university" any more, but an organic path chosen by the individual. Governments and companies, or even individuals with enough money, will submit their research problems to such "fun parks" to get them resolved. It will be a win-win situation for everyone.

The CredX is an evolution towards this, but not exactly this. So CredX is a positive step forwards, and I welcome it. However, I hope that, those with power to speed this evolution, to speed it up, so that we have this better educational system as soon as possible.

Every second that passes without us having this system, is a moment where humanity loses a potential Noble Prize winner, a Millennium prize winner, etc. It is very sad when you look at where we could have been today, had we spent our resources (money, time, energy) at the right direction.

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