Short Paper: Smart Contracts for Government Processes Case Study and Prototype Implementation.
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Presented at FinancialCryptographyandDataSecurity 2020 by
We study blockchain-based integrity-protected smart contracts as an implementation mechanism for municipal government processes. To this end, we attempted a prototype implementation of such aprocess in collaboration with a Danish Municipality. We find that such animplementation is possible, despite the obvious confidentiality requirements, and that it does provide benefits: integrity guarantees, verifiability, direct collaboration and payments between the parties. These benefits come at the cost of latency, pr. transactions charges, immutabilityof errors, and a very concerning single point of failure the municipalgovernment: losing blockchain private keys means losing control overmunicipal government casework, with no recourse. Our municipal government partner felt that altogether no immediately pressing problemwas solved by the implementation, and that the latter risk clearly outweighed any benefits. We note that smart contract implementations ofgovernment processes needs to be immutable and outside of the government’s control when running; however, they also need to be updatablewhen laws change, and provide an “out” for the rare case when errors inthe contract implementation result in unlawful behaviour. We proposethese conflicting requirements as a foundational research challenge forblockchain to be applicable to governmental processes.