Blockchain in the Smart City and Its Financial Sustainability from a Stakeholder’s Perspective

Abstract

In this paper, we take a city’s budget, which represents the resources that need to be allocated, and test how many blockchain users need to join a voting process of how the city’s resources should be allocated in order to best represent their preferences. This voting process can be tracked very well through the utilization of IoT and smart technology in a smart city. Therefore, we showed that the budget resource allocation of a smart city can be significantly optimized through the utilization of blockchain technology. We found that just a tiny fraction of 0.12% of the population of blockchain participants is needed to significantly represent the spending behavior of the total population. This has significant implications as it shows the strength and importance of a required blockchain in a smart city and its minimal energy consumption requirements.