I sometimes get asked what some practical use cases for blockchain are, every time I try to steer the conversation away from Crypto & NFTs because while they have some great practical uses they get a bit too much of the limelight and I’d much rather educate people of something that they hadn’t heard before. If asked about projects that are working right now I’ll normally turn to Theta which is allowing video streaming without massive data centers or VeChain which is allowing better traceability for products and logistics but if asked about the future there are two things I’m super excited about.
The first one is easy; that’s the creation of a decentralised WiFi network that would reward people for sharing their internet connections which will help eliminate internet poverty in urban areas while simultaneously improving open WiFi hotspots by making them more accessible, secure, reliable & rewarding ;)
But the second one is digital twins. Digital twins are a replication of a real-world environment like a factory floor, a building, or even a city. Simply put it is a CAD (computer-aided design) version of a physical environment that is often recreated from photos or other scanning techniques. Digital twins allow you to record information, run simulations of different scenarios, view the environment in 3D, enter a VR (virtual reality) environment, use an AR (augmented reality) overlay & a heap of other use cases.
Digital twins don’t need blockchain to work, in fact digital twins work perfectly without the use of blockchains so why am I so excited about the possibility of blockchains being mixed with digital twins? It’s all about accessibility to data. At the moment there are thousands of people trying to recreate environments, some are mapping buildings, some are mapping roads, and some are mapping entire cities but they all need to bring that data back to a computer and then make it accessible to others. Sometimes it’s only accessible to a small hand full of people and other times they need to give access to multiple stakeholders and some of them even need to be able to manipulate parts of the data.
Blockchain allows for the control of the entire dataset with unbeatable security and almost unlimited flexibility for stakeholders to adapt it to their use case. Imagine a city like Christchurch decides to use Web3Jim’s blockchain to map the city, Land Information New Zealand may upload the base map as the standard default map and then different stakeholders can upload data to overlay it. As one person makes a change to a part of the map the other stakeholders can be informed of this.
Restricting access to parts of the map can also happen, for example, ratepayers could have full access to just their property information or a construction company could have the information to the area they are about to work to make sure they don’t dig into pipes or cables underground. The people who created the datasets and upload the information can have control as to who has access to that information and this would allow them to monetise their data to help them map more locations or at least recoup the expense of gathering that information.
There is a project called Hivemapper that is currently mapping the world multiple streets at a time by rewarding people with cryptocurrency for uploading dashcam footage captured on specific hardware. Think of any vehicle being able to be a mini version of Google Street View car without the need of an extremely expensive camera system and able to allow drivers to upload their normal routes.
Google currently pays massive sums of money every year to fit out vehicles with expensive imaging equipment and then they have to pay contractors to drive the vehicles to map the streets, Hivemapper has a different approach. Hivemapper figures that you are already driving on the road so why not record the information, upload it & get rewarded for it. Hivemapper is going to have more up-to-date data at a fraction of the cost to deploy a dedicated street view car. If you are going to put a dashcam in your car why not put a slightly better one in and help map the world?
