Blockchains and the Civic Nervous System
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Field Actions Science Reports The journal of field actions Special Issue 17 | 2017 Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in the City Blockchains and the Civic Nervous System Alessandro Voto Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/factsreports/4464 ISSN: 1867-8521 Publisher Institut Veolia Printed version Date of publication: 31 December 2017 Number of pages: 60-63 ISSN: 1867-139X Electronic reference Alessandro Voto, « Blockchains and the Civic Nervous System », Field Actions Science Reports [Online], Special Issue 17 | 2017, Online since 31 December 2017, connection on 01 May 2019. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/factsreports/4464 Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License www.factsreports.org In this article, Alessandro Voto takes us BLOCKCHAINS on a journey to explore how the rise of Blockchains protocol will transform city management enabling more distributed AND THE CIVIC city governance and the emergence of a range of new urban services where NERVOUS SYSTEM machines and humans collaborate in new ways to store, move and transact. Projected to operate at a fraction of the Alessandro Voto Institute for the Future - Blockchain Labs cost of centralized protocols, those new services will be particularly adapted to underserved populations by providing mobile and secure identity for them and the value that they create. Alessandro Voto is the West Coast Regional Director for Consensys, a Brooklyn-based blockchain technology venture studio. He connects organizations and social entrepreneurs with the local blockchain community to build applications & services. Alessandro also serves as a research affi liate at Institute for the Future’s Blockchain Futures Lab. KEYWORDS INTRODUCTION • BLOCKCHAIN In a departure from the centralized “brain” • BITCOIN of traditional city politics, blockchain-based • SMART CONTRACTS civic nervous systems will distribute political • CRYPTO-CURRENCIES intelligence and economic agency to the edges. • SELF-GOVERNING PROTOCOLS Humans won’t be the only ones making decisions • DIGITAL IDENTITY and acting on them. Machines and artificial • DECENTRALIZED CITY MANAGEMENT • GOVERNMENT-AS-AS-SERVICE intelligence agents will be equal contributors in the smart city symphony of the future. 60 AI in the city, the age of prediction and anticipation www.factsreports.org The city is a distributed organism. Its inhabitants work symbiotically URBAN IDENTITY UNBUNDLED to turn raw materials into life-sustaining products and services for the greater whole. To move and protect the value they generate Civic participation begins with identity and together, people depend on civic infrastructure like laws, markets citizenship. Whether it’s a person, a corporation, and contracts. Together, these tools and their enforcers act like a or a device, unique identifi ers help us extend our city-wide nervous system, letting communities reliably respond to trust to the right groups and protect ourselves emerging needs and painful attacks. from malevolent actors. For this reason, one of the most important functions a blockchain can serve Until now, we needed centrally-managed government and enterprise is to manage personal and organizational identity institutions to manage the records and processes behind this information. infrastructure at the city scale. In exchange, however, we gave these institutions the power to artifi cially limit our interactions so that they Currently, drivers licenses, passports, social could extract profi t or censor activities they deemed inappropriate. media profiles, and other forms of institutional Furthermore, they became convenient targets for data breaches identity are what makes you you. Without them, and third-party manipulation. it’s difficult or impossible to access financial services and legal protections. Worldwide, the Recent advances in technology stand to eliminate the need for United Nations estimates that there are 1.5 billion centralized bureaucracies, connecting peers directly to help them people who currently live without formal identity, track and execute economic and social agreements themselves. One excluding them from the urban services and such technology, known as a blockchain, uses these direct links as a protections it provides. hedge against centralized civic power. With blockchain-based identity services, anyone Blockchains are a kind of shared database that lets communities can cheaply establish a unique digital identifier. store records permanently across a network of computers. Any They can then start associating data about their peer can submit a record for others to store in the chronological, activities and relationships with the identifier synchronized chain alongside other’s records. The records and their through subsequent transactions on blockchain. relative order are protected with bank-grade encryption to ensure Each additional tamper-proof record helps paint a they can’t be altered, deleted, or forged by any single party on the higher-resolution picture of one’s trustworthiness. network. Since anyone on the network with a copy of the Blockchain technology will facilitate brand new kinds of cooperation blockchain can access these records, urban within and across cities. It will extend trustworthy institutional denizens can easily find and establish ties with protections and financial services to marginalized and poor new collaborators according to strict and verifi able people worldwide. It will reinvent the way we manage physical city criteria, all without a central identity manager. infrastructure and digital community structures. What follows Blockchain projects like Consensys’ Uport and is a brief glimpse into the future of a blockchain-based civic Blockstack Labs’ namesake identity system will nervous system. open up entirely new possibilities for identity management. City schools and mentors will pass unforgeable learning badges to their students, letting students port micro-credentials to new geographies and educational venues. Organizations will have their own blockchain “THE CITY IS A DISTRIBUTED ORGANISM. ITS INHABITANTS WORK SYMBIOTICALLY TO TURN RAW MATERIALS INTO LIFE- SUSTAINING PRODUCTS AND SERVICES FOR THE GREATER WHOLE. TO MOVE AND PROTECT THE VALUE THEY GENERATE TOGETHER, PEOPLE DEPEND ON CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE LIKE LAWS, MARKETS AND CONTRACTS. TOGETHER, THESE TOOLS AND THEIR ENFORCERS ACT LIKE A CITY- WIDE NERVOUS SYSTEM.” 61 www.factsreports.org personas, with their civic and environmental transactions for the network. Once the coin is mined, its owner impact audited and visible to others. Even can pass it along by submitting a transaction record to miners for municipal robots will have their identity tracked inclusion in the public blockchain. All of this is done without formal to ensure they are performing up to code and not identity using only cryptographic addresses to hold and move funds. deviating from their duties. By logging transactions across a massive network of pseudonymous peers instead of a central payment processor, anyone with an The notion of citizenship will scale past Internet connection can accept or send the currency without fear of administrative hurdles as blockchain transactions reveal rich information about people’s censorship or rent-seeking middlemen. contributions to their community. Once-vulnerable Bitcoin and other so-called “cryptocurrencies” will open flows of migrant populations will earn “global citizenship” value between city residents and global partners that challenge beyond national borders through applications like long-standing borders and regulations. The global poor and the Bitnation. Since blockchains don’t necessarily ultra-elite alike will use these frictionless networks to access require static, formal identity information to international investment opportunities and banking services never participate usefully in them, we might also see afforded to them before. minimum-viable-identity governance systems and one-time-use ID’s that expand access to services Since all payments can be traced back to the accounts that for people deeply concerned about their privacy initiated them, people and organizations will opt to associate their and security. “true” identity with their accounts to hold themselves and others accountable for spending money. City governments will have their Whether through rich self-sovereign identities or own accounts, known in blockchain parlance as wallets. Citizens disposable personas, blockchain-based identity will fund government wallets with transparent tax contributions, will let people lay true claim to their data and, authorize spending as a crowd, and carefully audit transaction importantly, their wealth. ledgers to minimize corruption and wasteful spending. NGO’s will do the same with tools like Bitgive to help philanthropists track their CIVIC VALUE NETWORKS impact on developing urban centers. Since Bitcoin, developers have spawned many so-called Bitcoin, a digital form of currency, both introduced “cryptocurrencies” like it. Dogecoin, for example, was a bespoke the concept of a blockchain and became its first currency that gained success from its playful branding marked by killer use case. Bitcoin has a software-defined poor language translation and Shiba Inu dogs. Others reinforced money supply, released first to “miners” that serious beliefs of fi nancial sovereignty, like the Sioux Indian Tribe use their personal computers to process new did with it’s own cryptocurrency called Mazacoin. In cities of the 62 AI in the city, the age of prediction and anticipation