In order to build a more livable city, the smart city plan will be carried out in 100 cities. Its goal is to use innovative digital technology in these cities and combine it with the vision of "Digital India" to realize the digital empowerment of citizens. The project will integrate "digital" into all aspects of urban life: from infrastructure, health care, education, cleaning, sanitation, waste management to other services.
On May 17, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation of India released the latest information about the smart city plan, saying that more than 1000 projects have been completed or are being implemented and tendered. EtherFlyer learned that the underlying technology of these projects is blockchain, and its role is to ensure the operation of smart cities. The emergence of blockchain will change the foundation of cities and even the "brain" of smart cities. This mechanism integrates key factors such as adaptability, accountability, transparency, accuracy and operational efficiency into the whole city.
EtherFlyer briefly introduces that blockchain is a distributed ledger technology, which can store information in multiple systems, realize peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange, and create trusted and secure distributed storage by using the verification process. This method is democratic and knowledge-based. Security and trustworthiness here mean that the blockchain network does not need any intermediate entities to perform any type of verification.
Most importantly, blockchain (public * * *) uses proof of work (PoW) or proof of interest (PoS) to obtain * * * knowledge. Once the information is recorded in the blockchain, the data cannot be deleted and operated. This brings the transparency of data and eliminates any form of tampering and manipulation.
From voting, security, land registration, logistics, health care, power distribution, banking, certificate, birth, death, education, housing and almost any other fields that need registration and governance, blockchain completely solves the trust problem. Although the Indian government has not yet developed all the potential of blockchain in smart cities, it has established a series of proof of concept (PoC) based on blockchain in the above areas. Especially on the eve of the emergence of new technologies, EtherFlyer believes that this concept proves very important. For the large-scale application of blockchain technology, this plan in India is very useful and worthy of attention. Therefore, EtherFlyer described the framework of this project, hoping that everyone can have a more specific understanding of the blockchain "smart city" and bring more inspiration.
Griffith University in Australia's research "Using blockchain technology to ensure the security of smart cities" shows the security framework and proposes how to combine blockchain with smart devices to provide a secure communication platform for smart cities. The main advantage of using blockchain security framework is that this mechanism can resist many threats. In addition, it also provides many unique functions, such as improving reliability, better fault tolerance, faster and more effective operation and scalability.
EtherFlyer believes that devices combined with blockchain technology will be integrated into a common platform in smart cities, and all devices can run safely in a distributed environment. "In the future, a system-level model should be designed to study the interoperability and scalability of different platforms used in smart cities," the paper also expounds this point.
Under the existing system in India, half of the data is hard disk copy and half is system integration across departments and organizations. Data can be easily changed, controlled or deleted in any intermediate link, and users must rely on "trust" in data operators, control systems and processors. For example, there have been many complaints about the disclosure of a large number of identity data, but the only authentication institution in India (UIDAI) has never acknowledged this problem. The problem now is not only data security, but also the "trust" of people in the organization.
In order to solve this problem, India was inspired by Estonia's management style. Estonia has completed the construction of residents' electronic data, while India's smart city citizen data will use the public blockchain model, which will eliminate the "trust" problem of the organization once and for all. In Estonia, even after obtaining the data node, citizens can know who has viewed their personal information, the list of organizations accessing the data, the data at the time of access and the purpose of the data.
The blockchain can realize a similar system and ensure the transparency and security of the Indian voting system. In every previous election, complaints about the manipulation of electronic voting machines (EVM), records and data have increased. Blockchain will be a reliable way to eliminate the "trust crisis" of machines. Blockchains are not manipulated at will like machines. India's smart city project will be applied to the world's largest voting system, which will be an example of the large-scale application of blockchain, which can not only reduce the election cost, but also greatly improve the transparency and efficiency of the system.
In addition to banks, government and private medical institutions will promote electronic health records (EHR), and blockchain can change the current recording methods of medical data such as drugs, blood, organs, medical licenses and doctor records. EtherFlyer learned that about 70% of health plan and health system IT executives believe that blockchain is very helpful for the operability of medical insurance.
Similar to other records, education certificates or records, birth/death certificates, land records, energy supply and all other communication data can be linked. EtherFlyer explained here that Uplink does not want to run these huge data on the blockchain, but uses the blockchain as the underlying logic to ensure that the data cannot be tampered with and the records are transparent.
Blockchain can also be used for warehousing, cold storage, transportation and other related agricultural data to improve transparency and reduce complexity and cost. Once the data related to any topic is added to the public blockchain, it can replace the existing "untrusted" system, and anyone can obtain the data at any time, depending on the rights granted. In the vertical application of agriculture, the application of blockchain in agricultural supply chain is introduced in detail.
NITI Aayog has been committed to the concept construction of India Chain (local blockchain project), which has been described as "India's exclusive blockchain infrastructure", but it has not provided further updates since last year, and the smart city task has not been implemented as planned. Insufficient execution (India is famous for its low administrative efficiency) and the obstacles of interest groups have led to the slow progress of blockchain smart cities. However, EtherFlyer believes that the framework of this project is still far-sighted, showing the great potential of blockchain application and making smart cities truly "smart". Ethereum's understanding of "intelligence" is neither technologically advanced nor materially rich, but the underlying logic is fair, open, transparent and unchangeable, which is consistent with Ethereum's decentralized trading concept. Individuals have formed a real social group rather than a power center through the blockchain, which is the future "smart city".