Pump and Dump Science
Grift, graft, and bitcoins — which is redundant in this scheme? And MDPI numbers are weird.
In 2016, Patrick Joyce founded Knowledgr, described as “a public blockchain and open-access scientific platform designed to modernize the infrastructure for scientific funding, research, and publishing.”
Joyce was a medical student at Georgetown at the time, having already earned a BS in biology from Elon University, a PhD in molecular biology from Boston University, and an MS in clinical studies also from BU.
Not much seemed to be going on at Knowledgr except for some code posted on GitHub and last updated in 2019.
That same year, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, posted on Medium his idea for a system where “research happened more like open source software and was more aligned with market incentives. It would also be nice if there was prioritization like Reddit, comments like Google Docs, and pull requests like GitHub.”
It was a tech-culture crazy quilt. Armstrong would call this system ResearchHub.
Fast-forward to 2023, and a few odd things had transpired involving these people and entities: