Blockchain and IoT: Distinguishing the Hype from Reality

Blockchain has been mentioned virtually by all research companies as the fast accelerating evolution and it is not only about the financial services companies, scope where we tackled the blockchain outside of cryptocurrency roots.

Actually, blockchain convergence and Internet of Things are on an agenda for a lot of companies and there’re existing implementations, initiatives and solutions in many areas, outside of financial services and IoT too.  It appears as if the blockchain technology is going to change different aspects of the digital business. Blockchain is the bigger deal than Internet. If you combine blockchain & IoT then you have 2 bigger deals than Internet who want each other for many reasons.

Security issue is the highly compelling reasons for using blockchain

At present, failure in IoT ecosystem exposes the multiple devices, vast amounts of personal data (example, the smart home devices generally have an access to the intimate details of our lives and day-to-day routines), and the supply chain partners as well as community.

This security flaws generally revolve over 3 areas: connection, authentication, and transaction. The devices that connect, verify, and spend improperly with any other devices are major concerns. By making use of blockchain to manage an access to the data from IoT any attacker will need to bypass the additional security layer that’s underpinned by the robust encryption standards accessible.

Oversight is important component that the blockchain adds to IoT equation.

With the data transactions happening between the multiple networks owned and been administered by the multiple organizations, permanent and immutable record means that custodianship is tracked as the data pass between the points in a supply chain.

The machines can record all the details of transactions that happen between themselves, without any human oversight. Without private keys giving the write-access to blockchain, no human can overwrite this record with inaccurate information.

Smart contracts are real game-changer in IoT applications.

By encoded logic it’s now possible to create the agreements that can be easily executed when some conditions are met. It is very useful for different types of scenarios. The basic example is you can authorize the payment, when the conditions indicate that the delivery of service is provided.

In such way all the interactions between consumer and connected device are been handled in the transparent, frictionless and untamperable way. There’s even a view that the blockchain & IoT convergence can become a big necessity at certain point of time.

Under prevailing IoT paradigm, the devices are connected through the centralized processing and cloud storage service. It is long-term, like with number of the connected devices and thus data volumes increasing fast, systems handling it are possible to get bloated and resulting in the inefficiencies and bottlenecks.

Blockchains will solve this all because of their distributed nature, and where data storage network gets duplicated over the hundreds of devices that make up this network. The massive amount of the redundancy means that data always will be close in hand when it is required cutting down the transfer times and that means one server failure is of no consequence for business activity.