Parkcoin project

Looking for Blockchain use cases in our daily life, we came across the idea of using Blockchain for parking tickets. To move this idea further we have been presenting it to the GTEC Blockchain contest taking place in Berlin in 2016. We have been very pleased to be among the finalists!

Parkcoin at F6S 2016

As mentioned by Professor Michael Mainelli in a recent  Coindesk article long term smart contracts will take a while to take off:

At least in the near term “dumb and short-term contracts” will prevail over “smart long-term contracts”

We had for sure this idea in mind using the Ethereum technology for parking tickets! Difficult to have simpler and shorter term contracts… Then the next question could be: “… nice but why do you then need a Blockchain technology for a parking ticket? isn’t it an over kill ?” After exploring the concept, which was to be honest, at the very beginning rather a technology show case, we see a number of benefits using a Blockchain technology. Just to mention a few:

  • Services provided: the Ethereum platform comes among many other things with a distributed database (no need to bother about replication), with sealed transactions (no need to implement this ourselves) and is fully hosted with a very granular pay per use mechanism.

  • Trust: for monetized services and pre paid accounts, trust is an important factor. Ensuring that the technology is proven and trustable and that the accounts are distributed and not owned by a company breaks a large obstacle for customers to trust the service.

  • Eco system oriented: because of the shared ledger, all stakeholders can equally and transparently interact in an eco system. It is a platform of choice for collaboration. This aspect develops further overtime when the different participants integrate more natively the shared ledger in their own infrastructure.

Through this simple example, we got even more convinced about the Blockchain potential and are now pursing this idea further.