Blockchain for IoT: A Big Idea Meets Hard Design Questions

#News(IoTStack) [ via IoTForIndiaGroup ]

On the edge
At the far-off edges of the IoT, where “things” tend to be very low-power and computationally simple, the argument is over how much complexity is helpful when integrating the network with a blockchain.

Some IoT experts, taking a practical view, think the only requirements at the end-points should be to deliver secure identity and no other complexity.

Amir Haleem, CEO of Helium, which is building a decentralized network of wide-range wireless protocol gateways and a token to connect edge IoT devices, said adding complexity to end devices “is like a gigantic hurdle to people actually building things.”

Apart from anything else, there’s the cost.

“People get very sensitive about the bill of materials (BoM) when you start talking at a scale of millions or tens of millions,” said Haleem. “You start proposing like a 60 cent addition to a BoM and all of a sudden that’s a meaningful number.”
Christian Reichenbach, a transformation consultant at HPE, argues that a proliferation of IoT devices capture so much data that some computation and analysis has to take place there to sort through it all.

At last year’s HPE Discover event, Reichenbach was part of a team demonstrating how an iRobot vacuum cleaner with a Raspberry Pi could use crypto tokens it earned from cleaning rooms to pay a smart plug for energy when it needed to recharge – what HPE calls “the servitization of products.”

“We need computing at the edge to get intelligence out of all this data and then that can be transferred back to data centers or a blockchain,” said Reichenbach, concluding:

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