IoT and blockchain: What are the possibilities? Posted on : Oct 17 - 2018

There’s a lot of speculation over the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technology. Is it a match made in heaven? Do they reinforce each other’s strengths–or do the technologies clash? Should they occupy separate worlds that don’t overlap? And what exactly is the Internet of Things anyway?

When dinosaurs roamed the Earth

During the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, tech companies strove to build a world where every desktop held a personal computer. Pretty safe to say mission accomplished.

The internet introduced a world where everyone could connect online. And then mobile phones connected everyone to everyone else no matter where they were at a given moment. Finally, things started to get interesting with a computer inside every machine.

The Internet of Things means exactly what the phrase says. Each thing–device, appliance, tool, vehicle, machine, whatever–contains a computer, and that computer connects to a network to transmit and receive information.

An Internet of Things example

Take the example of your household car. Your car computes, harvests data, stores data, analyzes that data, transmits data, receives data, makes decisions, and communicates messages.

These computations provide a service to you, the customer. You get GPS to aid your travel decisions, and entertainment gets streamed in to make your journey more comfortable.

Information about traffic conditions helps you make optimal decisions about routes, and the system tells you diagnostic information on whether your vehicle has a problem you need to address. View More