It is not an overstatement to say the true value of blockchain technology lies in its ability to use a decentralized model of interaction at the protocol level. This built-in capability is augmenting our Internet, which was built on the ideal of allowing free and unrestricted access to information for all. Instead, the Internet has become the tool for tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook to hold centralized power over its users. Governments have also been able to use this Internet-endowed power to reach to billions of people and manipulate the masses, filter out messages, and limit freedom of speech. Blockchain is the second try at the Internet's idealism, and here we stand in front of this great task. The word "decentralization" seems very utopian, and in the world of a blockchain enthusiast it sounds like a cure for many of the world's problems. But really, what is the value of such decentralization? Is it worth all the effort to break the current centralized organizations and processes into smaller decentralized pieces and micromanage everything at a smaller scale? In our last industrial revolution, value was created through economies of scale. Everyone became a part of a very big machine that output values beyond the sum of the parts. Why are we proposing the opposite now?

As the blockchain industry becomes larger, a new decentralized financial ecosystem is now developing. New financial instruments, represented by terms like tokens, coins, and ICOs are introduced to finance projects on blockchain. Blockchain is a technology that makes it possible to assign ownership of each piece of data to individuals who create that piece. As Pu and Yano (2020) points out, that may be the first step towards creating a high quality market. 1 At the same time, like a lock, blockchain is merely a technology that is designed to protect a type of property. Such a technology is of no use unless the society agrees a proper set of rules concerning 1 See Yano (2019) for details on market quality.

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This study investigates the new method of sharing research data by a blockchain. We focus on the sharing not only among researchers but also between a group of researchers and test subjects from whom researchers collect data. To explain the use of blockchain technology, we explain the use of blockchain in securely handling research data in comparison with a simple real-world use case. IntroductionDate sharing is one important issue faced by researchers building data covering both human health and behaviour. By data sharing, we do not simply mean the sharing of data among researchers, which is obviously highly important for us researchers. However, more important is the sharing of data between researchers and survey subjects. The latter issue would become sensitive when we deal with serious illness from which a person wants to hide the fact that he suffers or a person who can spread to others. In Japan, there remains serious social stigma attached to certain diseases. At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, in Japan, those contracted Sars-Cov-2 were ostracized in certain traditional regions. Even if such a stigma is not attached to contraction of a disease, losing private data and misinforming subjects of wrong test results could be intolerable for test subjects. In these circumstances, there can be a strong hesitancy on the side of a data builder to inform test subjects a result of the test.

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