{"id":45671,"date":"2021-10-04T06:00:38","date_gmt":"2021-10-04T10:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/?p=45671"},"modified":"2021-10-01T18:18:14","modified_gmt":"2021-10-01T22:18:14","slug":"cities-blockchain-cio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/cities-blockchain-cio\/","title":{"rendered":"Cities aren’t quite ready for blockchain, CIOs say"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cryptocurrencies \u2014 and blockchain, the decentralized distributed-ledger technology that powers them \u2014 are more popular than ever in mayor\u2019s offices around the country. But technology officials, in cities like Miami, Philadelphia and San Jose, California, still have unanswered questions about how the technology applies to their local governments.<\/p>\n

Though public blockchains \u2014 which provide a mostly tamper-proof method of keeping records without the need for a trusted third party \u2014 have existed for more than a decade, Miami Chief Information Officer Mike Sarasti said he only recently began taking them seriously. Sarasti told StateScoop that until 2021, he had mentally cast aside the technology as a \u201cgeneric smart-city\u201d sales pitch, most often encountered through cold emails or events held by blockchain enthusiasts within Miami\u2019s budding technology sector.<\/p>\n

And until recently, he said, he wasn\u2019t swayed by blockchain’s potential government use cases, few of which have taken hold in cities. A handful of states have formed blockchain committees to study the technology in recent years, but locally, Sarasti said, \u201cit didn\u2019t really have a lot of meaning for me.”<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone was just like \u2018blah, blah, blockchain,\u2019\u201d Sarasti said.<\/p>\n

A change of heart<\/h4>\n

Sarasti’s attitude changed, however, when Miami Mayor Francis Suarez took steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to embrace the technology. Suarez has courted cryptocurrency mining operations, considered paying city staff partially in bitcoin and recently went public with support for CityCoins, a cryptocurrency nonprofit that helps fund local governments with digital currency.<\/p>\n

Now, \u201cit\u2019s a whole different ball game,\u201d Sarasti said. Miami will soon invite companies to propose how they could help the city accept and invest in cryptocurrencies. Sarasti said the city is also exploring how validation, verification and auditing could be automated through the use of blockchain, potentially improving the efficiency of decades-old government processes, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlockchain is creating a real possibility that those things at some point could be automated without the need for trust,\u201d Sarasti said. \u201cThat\u2019s the thing that well-designed, secure blockchains are enabling. They\u2019re enabling an environment where you don\u2019t need an individual guaranteeing trust \u2014 you now have the technology itself and you can now have trustless transactions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sarasti said it will take time for those innovations to make their way into city government, largely because the knowledge required to navigate local government bureaucracy aren\u2019t well-documented or easily translatable to software developers who’ve never been in government.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo the extent that there are still a lot of unanswered questions, in practice this is still a very difficult thing for government to adopt,\u201d Sarasti said. \u201cOne, because of the mindset change and the cultural shift that\u2019s going to need to occur to some extent isn\u2019t insignificant. And frankly, we still have a lot of government processes trapped in people\u2019s minds.\u201d<\/p>\n

‘The rhetoric is off the charts’<\/h4>\n

Philadelphia CIO Mark Wheeler said he\u2019s also become more intrigued by blockchain over the past few months. Despite questioning some of the promises from blockchain enthusiasts that it will lead to a \u201cutopia\u201d of government efficiency, Wheeler said, he said \u201cthere is more to the technology than I had learned about in 2018. And there seems to be a great deal of interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf at some point this really takes off, and Philadelphia wants to be a CityCoin<\/a> participant, I want to really understand how this mining works, stacking, holding a token that is related to bitcoin and what that holding means and why you would get a reward for that,\u201d Wheeler said. \u201cIt\u2019s not for the faint of heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even as a technology official, Wheeler said, he had trouble at first understanding the complexities of blockchain, leading him to question how effective it could be for Philadelphia. The city has no plans to test blockchain, but Wheeler said he\u2019s looking for experts who can help the city find possible use cases.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know where we\u2019re going. I just want to have a conversation with my local blockchain people. People who\u2019ve been doing the work, believe in Philadelphia and see what we might be able to do together,\u201d Wheeler said.<\/p>\n

One use case that piqued Wheeler\u2019s interest was blockchain to track vehicles, allowing the city to know \u201cwhat all of the Ubers, all of the rental cars and privately owned vehicles are doing, not necessarily who’s behind them,\u201d Wheeler said. He said the city might be able to better manage congestion if it collects aggregated data on where vehicles park, stop or which roads they take. That\u2019s a promising idea, Wheeler said, but it\u2019s not something the city could do on its own, and there are still a lot of unanswered questions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t anticipate them all, but we have a chance to have a much better conversation about unintended consequences,\u201d Wheeler said. “And unfortunately, when I\u2019m in some of these chatrooms on Clubhouse, the rhetoric is off the charts with how magical the world is going to be once we\u2019re all using bitcoin and there\u2019s no more banks and no more governments. It\u2019s just not helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Technology officials say they’re interested in distributed-ledger technology, but that they have a few questions before their cities start investing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":45685,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"disable_grayscale_images":true,"grayscale_contrast":0,"sponsored_content":false,"display_author_bio":true,"story_type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20649,4676],"tags":[52,438,1209,1794,20972],"people":[],"special-report":[],"authors":[4698],"class_list":["post-45671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-emerging-tech","category-city","tag-blockchain","tag-miami","tag-philadelphia","tag-cryptocurrency","tag-citycoins","author-ryan-johnston"],"yoast_head":"\nCities aren't quite ready for blockchain, CIOs 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