This is my entry into the @originalworks sponsored writing contest for IONChain. I'd like to thank both @originalworks and IONChain for this opportunity! Here is the contest details if you wish to submit your own entry.

A IONChain Use Case to increase mobility and reduce traffic congestion.

Backgound :

Mobility is a huge problem for a vast number of the people that share our planet.
Millions of people cannot afford an automobile and therefore have extremely limited mobility, others are spending far too much of their monthly budget paying off their car and the maintenance, and both are negatively impacted by traffic congestion.

I personally moved cities because the city where I lived the first 92.5% percent of my life has become so incredibly congested, my twice daily commute was 15 minutes on the weekends and anywhere between 50 minutes and 2 hours on the weekdays. Australia is the 3rd fastest growing country in population (Source) and my hometown of Melbourne now boasts just under 5 million people with a growth rate of 2.7% (Source).

Unfortunately, the vast majority of jobs in Melbourne are centralised in the city... I lived a 10 minute drive from the city, and yet, if I left after 8am, it would take over an hour to make that commute. The sports stadiums and concert venues are also near the city, so you have to leave work very early on Fridays or else your commute could take 3 hours (for a 15 minute trip).

Concept :

IONChain teams up with Devecitech to produce the ENLİL:

Source

ENLİL is a smart vertical axis wind turbine project that transforms highways into renewable energy sources by using the dynamics of the city.

Source

Buses zoom past the ENLİL, generating wind power for them... the wind power is converted into electricity and sold to the grid, which is distributed to the bus companies and the passengers of the buses. Bus companies receive an extra revenue stream and bus passengers are rewarded with IONC.

Additionally automobiles could be charged a tax for passing the same points, which is also redistributed to the bus passengers. Instantly, mobility is increased as passengers start making money during their commute. This increases bus services, which increases mobility until eventually automobiles are used rarely and sparingly, solving traffic congestion and affecting very real change for the environment.

The payment to the bus passengers from the power generated and sold is a crucial piece to the puzzle... power generation will always be required.

Advantages of using IONChain

Security is the utmost importance in this use case. No one will want their travel and movement tracked so precisely, with potential very real safety concerns for both themselves and their personal property at home.

Each ENLİL device can be used for local data processing before transferring the relevant payment amounts to the cloud... allowing the ENLİL devices to be fairly powerful miners for IONChain... effectively earning the manufacturing cost back themselves. This should be very attractive for a city's council to approve the installation of these devices on high traffic roads.

The potential to earn IONC also makes the bus companies installation of IoT devices extremely attractive... and provides them with a huge competitive advantage over other forms of transport. How many services can truly and genuinely claim to reward/pay their customers?

As city councils start to embrace the advantages of this concept, suddenly the IONChain smart tickets that bus passengers have been using start to be reusable in other cities they visit. Currently, in Australia, each city has it's own public transport ticketing system, and they are all very different, and sometimes differ between trams, buses and trains.

IONChain could link the globe into one public transport ticket... where passengers can effectively be paid to travel.

IoT Industry and IONChain

In The Third Industrial Revolution, author and speaker Jeremy Rifkin talks about 3 internets; the communications internet (the one we know and love), the Internet of Things and a new burgeoning Energy Internet. The energy internet has already started in Germany where 700 homes are powered by solar power produced by the community, and bought and sold using Ethereum (Source).

IONChain has the capacity to span all three Internets. This is exactly the power of the One Device, One Code, One Coin approach. Technological advances have always been made once an organisation standardized a technology... sure fortunes were won and lost being either side of that battle (Beta vs VHS, IBM-compatible versus Atari/Commodore 64) but industries as a whole are able to advance once all companies follow certain guidelines... and IONChain as a non-profit is not only providing those guidelines, but tokenising the whole industry, which provides a competitive advantage to manufacturers who adopt IONChain.

IONChain versus the wild west

Personally, I love the idea of a smart home.... and I would have completely embraced all the technology if it wasn't for one thing.... manufacturers all have a compete disregard for my privacy.

In this fascinating TED Talk, the speakers hook up a special router and track all the data being sent out by the various smart devices in the home... the traffic is relentless, even when the owners are away on holidays... so much data is sent back to the manufacturers for research and development, but at an absolutely massive cost to privacy.

Lots of people in my social circles won't touch a lot of smart home devices for this reason, despite the products being fairly widely adopted... I do know, however, that it's only a matter of time before non-smart items are no longer available to purchase, in which case the security and integrity provided by IONChain will be the competitive advantage that I make my purchasing decisions on.

Device manufacturers are currently looking towards Alexa and Google Home as their data standards, as this provides a marketing dot point. However, the constant controversies between the big tech companies and the exploitation of our data will drive people towards IONChain as they look for a much safer alternative.

Decentralisation is the only way forward

Consumers and companies are all motivated by similar qualities; cost, speed, status and ease of use.

Most purchasing decisions are influenced by cost... however, cost becomes less relevant once a product is seen as an investment.... and IONChain could potentially turn anything into an investment using the Edge Computing technology. Edge Computing means that there are thousands or millions of processors, instead of one centralised server farm. It's unhackable, it's not prone to network outages and it makes every device that has capacity to be a IONChain datacenter an investment.

In the use case above... the ENLIL devices are investments... that could pay for themselves many times over during their lifetime... the process of travelling on public transport becomes an investment, the buses themselves become more on an investment as they earn IONC. Cities could install wifi hotspot modems all around, that people could pay for with IONC as they move from one device to the next, raising revenue for that city. People's own smartphones could earn them money as they process the IONChain transactions around them. Imagine the competitive advantage of a smart phone working for you while you're walking around. Forklifts in factories pay for themselves, not just in moving around containers, but also processing IoT data as they move around.

Trucks on the highway can become mobile datacenters as they collect data on traffic conditions, etc, that anyone can access for the cost of some IONC. The logistics industry is incredibly expensive to maintain... but if all their trucks, vans, trains, ships, etc also become data centers for IONChain, that could redefine the industry.

Reduce Climate Change
Solve Traffic Congestion
Increase Moblity
Use IONChain!

Thank you for reading!

ionchain2018