In the era of technological advancement, still Water is a basic need of life to live. The most important part is, by the reason of rapidly increasing population creates high volume of using water consumption forward the world as, ‘water the most valuable resource in next few decades.’ Urbanization the main social process in the world, among developed countries and also developing countries. Now days 55% live in urban areas. Climate, population and volatility of weather condition effect to the water resources. “785 million people lack even a basic drinking-water service, including 144 million people who are dependent on surface water.”
To protect water resources for next decades, government needs a trustworthy mechanism. From the natural resource to distributor as purified water, distributor to household. In the real-world scenario water supply authorities measure the production and the usage by censored IOT devices. To implement a trustworthy mechanism blockchain technology gives open, decentralized, immutable transparent ledger mechanism with peer to peer connectivity. In several countries, several projects and researches implemented to deploy blockchain water management system. The concept of smart city and internet of things devices merge the traditional trading system to networking mechanism with a stage of trust by preventing fraud.
Introducing blockchain system with cryptocurrency, showed path to deploy that mechanism to water supply system with smart contract. “Smart contract is a computerized transaction protocol that executes the term of a contract” is introduced by Nick Szabo in 1994. The prototype of water blocks is built on networked system, by IP addresses use in a block and convert it to hash and store as seller and buyer digital signature, the transactions of the block can be a public or private blockchain. There are many blockchain platforms in use. Water management system needs a blockchain that contain of smart contract and the law cost. Ethereum is the first smart contract contains blockchain. But the cost of the transaction is much expensive. Hyperledger is much cheaper than Ethereum, also contains the smart contract. In addition to that R3 Corda is a blockchain platform that use for trading and storing documents with law cost transactions. Suggestions are on Ethereum blockchain to use smart contract for trustworthy peer to peer secure transactions.
By deploying a blockchain based system to sell and buy water, able to metered production of purified water, usage of households and waste water at the stage of distributor to buyer. Applying WIFI connected digital meters in households and distributing places, able to measure the water and store usage as transactions. The transactions are validated by other connected users. Every transaction is visible to public. Also, cannot change transactions in the block, the reason of immutability. Buyers have trust on amount they pay and transparency of the production procedure. “Water company node calls the initial setting function in the smart contract to generate a transaction including the start date and the price of per liter and records it in the blockchain. The smart meter node executes the user login function and records its own Address (same as ID).” As they say by IOT devices, able to use for well managed peer to peer water management system with blockchain.
(Seung Jae Pee, n.d.)
https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-revision-of-world-urbanization-prospects.html
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drinking-water
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