Blockchain reflections from the first US commercial NB-IoT launch

Intresting reflections by Daniel Herb drving IoT at T- Mobile US

As we see this broad range of use cases develop I’ve been reflecting on what early trends are indicating. The massive IOT systems of the near future will likely have similar requirements.

• The assumption that we will have increasingly diverse (not standardized) data types, resources, and aggregators
• Native authentication
• The assumption that devices will have long sleep or complete power-off cycles
• Systems that maintain security when single nodes or a small group of devices in a node have their keys stolen or corrupted
• The ability to create and manage group memberships, and dynamically update them
• LWM2M compliant protocols such as MQTT, very restricted end point power, and application stacks that treat connecting as transmit and compute hungry activity (apps that respect the hardware)
• The ability to encrypt data in transit

You probably looked at these requirements and thought “blockchain”. Or at least, I did 😉 But these reflections also tell you why any mobile network based IOT solutions (or in other words, any IOT sensor which might be remote in the field) looks increasingly like it requires

• Proof of stake rather than proof of work
• Merkle trees or other hash-based signatures
• Compressed or truncated ledger
• Group signatures supported

This isn’t where blockchain IOT networks are today. But it is where they’ll have to get to in order to support “networks of networks” and massive IOT.