Blockchain and Governance
I came across this article a couple of weeks back.
The idea is one of 35 that Bloomberg Philanthropies selected from over 300 applications for the testing phase of its 2018 US Mayors Challenge. The challenge asked American cities for technology and data solutions for their most pressing challenges and awarded up to $100,000 in grants for each winning city to experiment with and refine their ideas. The ideas will be re-evaluated in August. Four cities will be awarded $1 million and one will receive a grand prize of $5 million to implement their ideas.
While the entire universe has been going ga-ga about crypto currency the actual use case of blockchain which is relevant, immediately needed and powerful is governance.
Blockchains make sense only when deployed at a systemic scale. It does not make any sense to take up that sort of effort for small scale encryption and data storage. Given this fact, governments should be jumping at this technology to put everything from land to vehicle registry as well as insurance and aid schemes which typically involve monthly cycles on the blockchain.
The trouble is that it makes the system too transparent!
The idea of putting the data of the homeless on a blockchain is a very interesting idea and a perfect application of the technology. I would want to follow this and see how this plays out over a period of time.