#IoT: Internet of Tomatoes

In a previous post we looked at how we are going to scale #IoT deployments. The conclusion was that we needed the notions of trust and privacy to be in place for that to happen. In a follow up post, we looked at using a middle man to provider a broker platform that would mediate transactions between server side service applications and nodes in the field. While this seems to be a standard approach that has worked in the past for many markets, it does not seem to be catching on in #IoT for unknown reasons so far. Hence the need to look at fresh ideas to drive this horizontal exponential growth in #IoT deployment.

Looking at movement in the market, we see that there has been a huge growth in the acceptance of blockchain technology in the financial community. Regardless of which digital currency is used for the transactions, be it bitcoin or IoTcoin, the underlying technology seems to be perfectly suited for private and trusted #IoT transactions.

Privacy
Nodes conducting transactions using blockchain can choose to expose only specific information regarding the node and the owner of the node. It is not necessary as in the broker model to perform full disclosure during the registration phase before being allowed to transact. Nodes can even expose different information for different transactions.

Security
By design, security is one of the main factors on which blockchains are built using strong encryption, chains of transaction blocks and temporal transaction tracking. The details of how this works are exciting and are to be found in many postings on the web these days.

Trust
Any write up of blockchain will include a big section on how the technology enables trusted transactions between untrusted parties. How digital contracts are secured and enforced online in the electronic ledger to remove friction from doing business.

Micro-payments
In the case of bitcoin, the coin is divisible to eight decimal places which is ideal for doing micro-payments to nodes where it is expected that a sensor reading to be sold for a thousands of a cent. If a new IoTcoin is introduced then for sure it will also use the same scheme to allow such small payments. Such a transaction is now possible since we are talking about a digital, peer to peer secure transaction with no broker, no fees, and no friction. Such payments open the door for giving people back the ownership of their data since there would be a means to charge for it before releasing it to multiple entities.

I strongly recommend that you read this book or for that matter any other book on blockchain technology while keeping in mind how it applies to #IoT.

So there we have it! No broker, no fees, no friction. A beautiful way to proceed with secure micro-payment transactions in a private and trusted fashion directly with any smart and connected node. Best of all, the scheme is based on an industry standard which is what everyone has been asking for.

Always interested to hear your comments about the subject but please do not try to convince me that #IoT is still hype.

Also Read: #IoT Big Data is worthless!