
How Blockchain Can Bolster Land, Water, Spectrum And Energy Management
Blockchain offers federal and state governments a powerful opportunity to reform public markets and costly economic systems such as land, water, spectrum and energy management — without the need for central control — according to experts and speakers at a recent national seminar series on Blockchain.
Much of the public attention around blockchain has been focussed on the crypto-currency, bitcoin. But the seminar heard the real interest for government is blockchains ability to share trusted transactional data between agencies and jurisdictions, without any one agency having to control the system. Each agency can manage its own data, in a single source of truth across government.
This comes as all governments are looking to share data across their portfolios and with each other. This is being driven by the need to create integrated personalised services, reform costly and slow business systems, the use of multiple data sources to inform and redesign policy and programs.
At its most basic blockchain is similar to a public spreadsheet, a ledger that all parties can see, offering full visibility on the information, which is then signed and locked in the block, and connected into a chain as an audit trail. Once locked everyone can trust the information as a single source of truth.
Each transaction in a block can also be programmed — called smart contracts — offering government agencies a powerful mechanism to overhaul complex business systems such as procurement supply chains, stock selling, health payments, tracking the pedigree of food and livestock, and managing the many registries governments centrally control.
DECENTRALISING CONTROL
The seminar heard it was blockchain’s ability to run without central control that opens up a whole world of reform.
The co-author of two Data 61 reports about Blockchain, Dr Mark Staples, explained that blockchain’s distributed approach logically centralises information, but administratively decentralises control. This he said allows each agency or jurisdiction to retain its own authority while working with others on a single source of truth. Read more
Originally posted at: https://www.cryptocurrencyguide.org/how-blockchain-can-bolster-land-water-spectrum-and-energy-management/

