I think there's 2 questions that need to be asked: what can DLT's (ie: distributed ledger technologies like blockchain/DAG/etc) do for IoT, and what can IoT do for DLT's?
Use cases of DLT for IoT seems to be less useful in the near future or already addressed by more traditional cryptographic techniques. Lots of people talk about M2M payments but then there's the question of how decentralized you want to be or are able to afford. Remember, system requirements for nodes can be substantial, the most expensive dell gateway doesn't even have 1/2 the RAM or 1/4 the SSD space necessary to run an IOTA node (2gb/32gb vs the requisite 4gb+/200gb SSD), and IOTA was supposed to be designed for IoT! If I had to guess, nodes will stay in the cloud until superior DLT's gain popularity (I was reading a whitepaper that claimed their node only consumed 2mb of RAM and 12mb of flash, but who knows whether that's accurate). edgex foundry's project vision alludes to blockchain integration, so that should bode well for the future. On the flip side, IoT can be very useful for DLT's by providing information for smart contracts (a lot of utility for smart contracts is limited by the lack of plentiful/trustworthy sources of real world data) and collecting data for auditing (ex: Walmart+IBM teaming up to track perishable foods in their supply chain with blockchain) -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mats Wichmann Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2017 8:43 PM To: Gregg Reynolds <[email protected]> Cc: iotivity-dev <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [dev] IOT and blockchain On 12/28/2017 01:43 PM, Gregg Reynolds wrote: > > That's pretty much where I am. I cannot (yet) see how you can have > both ultra-constrained nodes and blockchain, but that's prolly cause > I'm not smart enough. The one use case I can see is audit trail, > keeping a record of on/off-boarding, config changes, OTA updates, etc. yeah, I think this is where the thought appeal lies. maybe in the home, but more likely in industrial, smart cities, and other such applications: nodes wanting to reconfigure themselves to adapt to situations that matter - where power is sent to, how transportation units are routed, etc. It's a problem if this reconfiguration happens at the behest of bad actors, and "blockchain solves that" conceptually, by making it really difficult for such bad actors to gain the credibility to make those changes. But I'm not that convinced that the technologies of distributed consensus-making that are in play today are anything those in control of such "valuable" resources are ready to give up their control over. Call me a skeptic. _______________________________________________ iotivity-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.iotivity.org/mailman/listinfo/iotivity-dev ________________________________ CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This is a transmission from Homedics, LLC, and the information contained herein, and all attachments are privileged, confidential and proprietary information intended only for the addressee. If you are not the addressee, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, dissemination, distribution, copying or use of the contents of this transmission and any attachments is not allowed and expressly prohibited. If you received this transmission in error, please destroy it and notify Homedics, LLC immediately at (248) 863-3000. CAUTION: Internet and e-mail communications are the property of Homedics, and Homedics reserves the right to retrieve and read any message created, sent and received. Homedics reserves the right to monitor messages by authorized Homedics' associates at any time without any further consent. _______________________________________________ iotivity-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.iotivity.org/mailman/listinfo/iotivity-dev
