Bitcoin and blockchain technologies solve IoT interoperability problems without the need to build unified standards

One of the main themes of this year's Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit was the challenge of connecting the growing number of IoT standards. Many speakers at the day's conference were hopeful about the potential for functional interoperability, and there were even calls for a merger of two major open source efforts: AllSeen (the Internet of Things Alliance) and IoTivity (an open source IoT software framework) if there are no unified IoT standards.

However, others, such as Dutch IT consultant Benedikt Herudek, were more skeptical. 'Forget IoT standards,' Herudek told attendees during his presentation 'Consensus in the Internet of Things - A Solution to the 'Remote Online Order' Problem.'

“In my experience, it’s wishful thinking to have everyone use the same standards.”

However, Herudek is not satisfied with an IoT world separated into silos. He proposes a potential solution, one based on a proven technology: Bitcoin . In Herudek's view, the same qualities of versatility and security that Bitcoin and blockchain technology can bring to financial transactions can also be applied to the IoT messaging protocol problem. Specifically, Herudek outlines a version of Bitcoin's "proof of work" consensus mechanism that can translate messages between all IoT applications without the need for trusted middlemen or resorting to industry or vendor protocol standards.

The proposal was partly inspired by the 'Decentralized p2p Automatic Telemetry System (ADEPT) Proof of Concept' developed by IBM and Samsung, which is similar to the application of Bitcoin and blockchain in the Internet of Things. According to Herudek, his proposal improves on ADEPT. Both solutions are based on the P2P Bitcoin cryptocurrency protocol for financial transactions, using its 'wallets' and 'miners' as the equivalent of IoT endpoints. At the same time, blockchain is a public distributed ledger.

“Bitcoin and blockchain are able to create consensus across many different institutions. Blockchain has some economic advantages over centralized clouds, where maybe the next version update of the cloud won’t support your device. A distributed blockchain system is a system that can organize itself and is not dependent on a single vendor, which allows you to own something for a long time. Bitcoin gives you security in a distributed system without identity and access management. Normally, if people don’t follow the rules, the identity management system will kick you out, but Bitcoin doesn’t do that because it says: ‘I have a convincing algorithm that no one can cheat.’”

Instead of using Bitcoin's proof of work, Herudek proposed using a 'useful proof of work'. He also gave an example of the Internet of Things: a smartphone telling a smart refrigerator to open its door.

“This happens at a very high level, not at the transport level. You have to get the protocol message format and semantics agreed upon — you can put value into it — and you need to implement a specific behavior. So, we can take a model similar to Bitcoin where you have an interpreter, similar to a miner, that is responsible for providing the message schema. There are three steps: format exchange, content exchange, and behavior exchange.”

Use smart learning algorithms instead of hashing

Challenges of using Bitcoin for IoT include: Using miners hashing sessions in well-defined use cases, like transferring money between two parties.

“Instead of using hashing, you can use a similar machine learning algorithm to translate and then get rewarded for the translation. This algorithm essentially uses the blockchain as a training set. You can record not only the transactions between entities, but also how they attempted to exchange them. You can give them features like what kind of sponsors were involved and what kind of technology was used. You can add training sets to the blockchain to drive these.”

Herudek also discussed issues such as immutability, security and how to measure 'effort'. Much of the proposal requires a solid understanding of Bitcoin and the latest IoT information exchange methods. However, this approach is very interesting because it could be a ready-made alternative to a standards development process that could take many years to reach a technical and political/commercial level.

“In IT, it can take years to integrate apps. If you open your Bitcoin wallet on your iPhone, you can communicate with other wallets around the world in minutes.”