How To Develop A Blockchain Application
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The possibilities are virtually countlessespecially when the power of IoT is combined with that of other technologies, such as machine learning. But some major hurdles will surface as billions of smart devices will want to interact among themselves and with their owners.
While these blockchain base system device cannot be met with the current models that are supporting IoT communications, tech firms and researchers are hoping to deal with them through blockchainthe technology that constitutes the backbone of the famous bitcoin. All devices are identified, authenticated and connected through cloud servers that sport huge processing and storage capacities.
Connection between devices will have to exclusively go through the internet, even blockchain base system device they happen to be a few feet apart. While this model has connected generic computing devices for decades, and will continue to support small-scale IoT networks as we see them today, it will not be able to respond to the growing needs of the huge IoT ecosystems of tomorrow. Existing IoT solutions are expensive because of the high infrastructure and maintenance cost associated with centralized clouds, large server farms and networking equipment.
The sheer amount of communications that will have to be handled when IoT devices grow to the tens of billions will increase those costs substantially. Even if the unprecedented economical and engineering challenges are overcome, cloud servers will remain a bottleneck and point of failure that can disrupt the entire network. This is especially important as more critical tasks such as human health and life will become dependent on IoT.
Moreover, the diversity of ownership between devices and their supporting cloud infrastructure makes machine-to-machine M2M communications difficult. A decentralized blockchain base system device to IoT networking would solve many of the blockchain base system device above. Adopting a standardized peer-to-peer communication model to process the hundreds of billions of transactions between devices will significantly reduce the costs associated with installing and maintaining large centralized data centers and will distribute computation and storage needs across the billions of devices that form IoT networks.
This will prevent failure in any single node in a network from bringing the entire network to a halting collapse. However, establishing peer-to-peer communications will present its own set of challenges, chief among them the issue of security.
And as we all know, IoT security is much more than just about protecting sensitive data. The proposed solution will have to maintain privacy and security in huge IoT networks and offer some form of validation and consensus for transactions to prevent spoofing and theft. Blockchain offers an elegant solution to the peer-to-peer communication platform problem. It is a technology that allows the creation blockchain base system device a distributed digital ledger of transactions that blockchain base system device shared among the nodes of a network instead of being stored on a central server.
Participants are registered with blockchains to be able to record transactions. Transactions are verified and confirmed by other nodes participating in the network, thus eliminating the need for a central authority. Blockchain makes trustless, peer-to-peer messaging possible and has already proven its worth in the world of financial services through cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, providing guaranteed peer-to-peer payment services without the need for third-party brokers.
The concept can directly be ported to IoT networks to deal with the issue of scale, allowing billions of blockchain base system device to share the same network without the need for additional resources.
Blockchain also addresses the issue of conflict of authority between different vendors by providing a standard in which everyone has equal stakes and benefits.
Blockchain base system device helps unlock M2M communications that were practically impossible under previous models, and allows for the realization of totally new use cases. The IoT and blockchain combination is already gaining momentum, and is being endorsed by both startups and tech giants.
The combination of IoT and blockchain base system device is also creating the possibility of a circular economy and liquefying the capacity of assets, where resources can be shared and reused instead of purchased once and disposed after use.
An IoT hackathon hosted by blockchain platform leader Ethereum put the concept of blockchain-powered IoT to test, in which some interesting ideas were presentedincluding in the domain of energy sharing and electricity and gas billing. Filament is another startup that is investing in IoT and blockchain with a focus on industrial applications such as agriculture, manufacturing and oil and gas. Filament uses wireless sensors, called Taps, to create low-power autonomous mesh networks for data collection and asset monitoring, without requiring a cloud or central network authority.
The firm uses blockchain technology to identify and authenticate devices and also to charge for network and blockchain base system device services through bitcoin. Chain of Things is a consortium that is exploring the role of blockchain in dealing with scale and security issues in IoT.
The system facilitates the process in which a solar panel connects to a data logger, tracks the amount of solar energy produced, securely delivers that data to a node and records it on a distributed ledger that is synced across a broader global network of nodes. Some of these issues will inevitably apply to the extension of blockchain to IoT.
These challenges have been acknowledged by tech firmsand several solutions, including side-chains, tree-chains and mini-blockchains, are being tested to fix the problem. Processing power and energy consumption is also a point of concern.
Encryption and verification of blockchain transactions are computationally intensive operations and require considerable horsepower to carry out, which is lacking in many IoT devices.
The same goes for storage, as ledgers start to grow in size and need to be redundantly stored in network nodes. And, as Machina Research analyst Jeremy Green explainsautonomous IoT networks powered by blockchain will pose challenges to the business models that manufacturers are seeking, which includes long-term subscription relationships with continuing revenue streams, and a big shift in business and blockchain base system device models will be required.
Ben Dickson is a software engineer and the founder of TechTalks. More posts by this contributor Unlocking the potential of eye tracking technology Can you trust crypto-token crowdfunding?
