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Since the emergence of these two Technologies, it can be a near future possibility that blockchain and other forms of crypto-currency will be used more frequently.

According to this article:

The decentralized, autonomous, and trustless capabilities of the blockchain make it an ideal component to become a foundational element of industrial IoT solutions. It is not a surprise that enterprise IoT technologies have quickly become one of the early adopters of blockchain technologies.

Furthermore at the end of the Article, A company named Filament is using BitCoin payment to enable sensors for particular applications in different geographical regions.

Are there any open source applications available to peek into for BLOCKCHAIN+IoT currently?

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    Related: Could a blockchain really prevent malware in the Internet of Things?
    – Aurora0001
    Apr 5, 2017 at 19:16
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    The problem is that blockchain is a really fancy buzzword and most people don't understand it. Certainly on CxO level that is the thing of the hour. However, you need basically two things, complicated calculations and a lot of distributed databases. Both are inherently incompatible with a lot of IoT concepts. So while there are conceivable blockchain applications, most that are currently put forward fail one of the base prerequisites.
    – Helmar ♦
    Apr 5, 2017 at 21:02

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It doesn't appear to be open source, but IBM offers Watson IoT with Blockchain as a platform for secure private blockchains for IoT services:

IBM Watson IoT Platform enables IoT devices to send data to private blockchain ledgers for inclusion in shared transactions with tamper-resistant records. Blockchain’s distributed replication allows your business partners to access and supply IoT data without the need for central control and management.

In reality, what IBM hopes to achieve with this is:

  • records that should be impossible to modify (just like Bitcoin's ledger)

  • decentralization, which should (in theory) remove the need for data servers for the business

  • 'smart contracts', which can automatically perform actions if a criterion is met.

The example they give on their website (near the 'Play' button in their 'Overview' section) is a smart contract which would detect if a package overheats and automatically charge the organisation responsible at each stage. For example, if a package overheated during shipping, the smart contract could automatically assign responsibility to the shipping company or highlight a package for inspection to check that it's still OK.

However, there's still some things to be sceptical about. As noted by Tractica:

One of the details that IBM talked about during the briefing was related to the implementation of blockchain on low-power devices. With the processing of blockchain being extremely challenging on these low-power devices, the blockchain processing is performed in the cloud.

So, in theory, all the processing gets done on the device itself, removing the need for the centralised server... But in reality, the overhead of the blockchain (e.g. the cryptography involved, which is always a problem for low-power devices) forces IBM to provide a cloud solution anyway. It would certainly be worth investigating this further before deciding if this is a good solution—if cloud access is required anyway, a centralised server might make a lot more sense—and save a lot of money—by avoiding the requirement for all your devices to run the cryptography you need for the blockchain.

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    Aaaand it would only work if I either trust IBM or they have a lot of people chipping in databases and validating processing nodes, without having the luxury to automatically provide a reward like bitcoin does.
    – Helmar ♦
    Apr 5, 2017 at 20:57
  • Agreed that the "proof-of-work" approach followed by Bitcoin would be too intensive for most low-power devices. But if a proof-of-elapsed-time (themerkle.com/what-is-proof-of-elapsed-time) approach was used (as is usable in IBM Hyperledger sawtooth), would it be feasible then?
    – Bharat Mallapur
    Nov 6, 2017 at 10:48
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I faced interesting discussion started by Theo Priestley at LinkedIn about IoT and blockchain stating:

IoT cannot

-- authenticate millions/billions of service nodes (sensors, devices, etc.),

-- secure data between sensors and the database,

-- provide firmware & operating system protection,

-- manage IoT nodes without servers, nor

-- manage provisioning of IoT services & nodes.

Having said this, blockchain can be adapted to IoT applications -- primarily in asset accounting, general ledger & payments -- assuming IoT assets are allocated and in a static state.

At least for me vision about a good match with these two in a sense of pure IoT technology conjuction was thrown to carbage after this read.

Roger Attick (author of citation) is a source I appreciate about IoT and all new technologies.

Reasoning is that the transaction rate possible by blockchain is so slow (original post by TP).

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  • Blockchain has first major break through in Bitcoin, it will look somewhat different when the IoT comes to play. That was I think the overall consensus of other comments on that post. So the thing of IoT with Blockchain can and will be fixed later on. My answer gives the current status.
    – mico
    Jul 31, 2017 at 19:12

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