Content area
Full Text
Abstract- The current water trade market is burdened with administrative complexities and complicated financial settlement processes which may take days or months to settle transactions. This dissuades small irrigators from joining water trade markets, leading to huge waste of water resources all over the world. Financial settlement involving multiple institutions or fiat currencies is one of major bottlenecks to immediate and transparent trading between small irrigators and small or medium consumers. In this paper we explore the possibility of a light weight peer-to-peer water trading system leveraging smart contracts which reside on private blockchains. Every water trading transaction is dictated by a smart contract which guarantees immediate payment to 'selling' irrigators on confirming delivery of water to 'buying' consumers. The smart contract and measurements by water flow sensors are on a blockchain which ensures immutability and transparency through digital signature(by "seller" and "buyer" in our system), hashing, and consensus in a distributed manner by participating nodes. Each node on our system implements a Geth client which runs on a private Ethereum blockchain. Geth is a command line interface implemented in Go for running a full Ethereum node. All nodes in the private blockchain(an overlay P2P network built using Raspberry Pi boards serving as nodes) run an Ethereum Virtual Machine(EVM). The Geth client manages the local copy of the smart contract on each node, created. In our system, we control Geth through a web server built on Node.js.
Keywords- Internet of Things; Blockchain; Smart Contract; Water Trading System; Ethereum;
I. Introduction
Water trading involves either the transfer of ownership of permanent water entitlements or purchases/sales of irrigation water on a temporary basis, usually within an irrigation season[1]. Majority of current water trading involves water trade intermediaries over privately negotiated sales, incurring service charges and high margins which make the trading complicated through opaqueness. This dissuades small irrigators from actively participating in water trade market, resulting in loss of vast amount of water resources. With Bitcoin's price continuing to capture attention even while swinging wildly, the underlying technology, blockchain, is traversing unchartered territory in the water sector[2]. Exploring applications in water rights trading, water treatment contracts and data sharing to name a few, blockchain-based solution providers are branching out from cryptocurrencies and finding footholds in non-financial...