The Leading IoT Industry Event

Posted by Alfredo on September 26th, 2018

One of the world's leading Internet of Things (IoT) industry events is nearly upon us. Over several days the beautiful Spanish city of Barcelona is hosting the IoT Solutions World Congress in October. This annual event offers a key opportunity for industry stakeholders to meet, learn new things, and build new and exciting partnerships for the future. Over 300 exhibitors will showcase cutting edge technology in an exhibition spanning two halls over 32,000 square metres. Thousands of people are expected to attend the event and the majority will be senior executives and C-level staff. The goal of the event is to bring together the leading players and best minds in the industry to meet and converse about the hottest topics in the IoT industry. One of the hottest technologies that will take be taking a central role at the conference is blockchain technology.

Blockchain is huge at the moment and only getting bigger at an exponential rate. Created by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto who no one has even been able to accurately identify. Is he a real person? Or perhaps a secretive group working under a pseudonym? Either way it was quickly adopted by the tech community and has spread like a wild fire around the world - originally due to its use with the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. So what is Blockchain?

In a nutshell The Blockchain is basically a ledger that is publicly available that records and confirms transactions anonymously. It is like a record of events that have occured between a multitude of parties. One crucial aspect of this ledger is that once something has been entered onto it, it can never be altered - the record of all of these transactions are recorded there forever.

So what are these transactions that are being recorded. In the case of Bitcoin for example, the currency is 100% digital - there are no actual, physical coins associated with ownership. In fact you don't even own them in an online bank account of Bitcoins which can be tricky for people to get their heads around initially. Instead the 'owner' of Bitcoins is able to pass that ownership to another person by adding another block (record) onto the blockchain. Just as you don't own Bitcoins in a bank account, neither is there one central bank that holds the blockchain either. Instead a variety of scattered nodes have been distributed and managed that hold a copy of the blockchain. Users can even download a copy of the blockchain, or ledger, themselves though the file size is huge and impractical for most people.

The reason why people are so passionate about blockchain and cryptocurrencies is that they are decentralised, anonymous and there are usually zero fees involved. Due to its open nature it is open to scrutiny by anyone and everyone and there are a number of ways of obtaining them. The easiest is to buy them but it is also possible to mine new coins, which is in a way like printing your own money though it is obviously more complicated than that.

People are able to mine new coins by solving complex mathematical puzzles. These puzzles are essentially a check of the previous blockchain, a verification of transactions and if the calculation is correct then they are rewarded with new coins, or a percentage at least. The catch is that these computations needed masses of processing power and electrical usage that makes them uneconomical nowadays for everyone except those that have specialist equipment and access to cheap power. There are examples of bitcoin mines in Iceland and China that are successful for those two reasons.

Blockchain technology is still in its early days and has not become truly mainstream. In time this is seen is one of the major disrupting technologies that has yet to be fully explored.