I’ve said a few times that I think the Internet of Things is where mobile was a couple of decades back. Some of us had mobile phones, and we loved them, but we really didn’t see what they were going to turn in to. I mean, I was always bullish about mobile payments, but even so… the iPhone X that’s next to me right now playing “Get Out Of Denver” by Eddie & the Hot Rods out through a Bluetooth speaker is far beyond anything that I might have imagined when dreaming of texting a Coke machine to get a drink. We’re in the same position now: some of us have rudimentary Internet of Things bits and bobs, but the Internet of Things itself will be utterly beyond current comprehension.
Specialized elements of hardware and software, connected by wires, radio waves and infrared, will be so ubiquitous that no one will notice their presence
From The Computer for the 21st Century – Scientific American
That was Mark Weiser’s prediction of the Internet of Things from 1991. It seems pretty accurate, and a pretty good description of where we are headed. This is world in which computers and (and financial services) vanish from view and are instead part of the warp and weft of everyday life. What I’m not sure Mark would have spent much time thinking about is what a total mess it is.
Whether it’s wireless kettles or children’s toys, it’s all being hacked. We’ve gone mad connecting stuff up, just because we can, and we don’t seem concerned about the nightmare in the making. I gave a talk about this a couple of years ago at Cards & Payments Australia making the point that I’m not sure how financial services can begin to exploit the new technology properly until something gets done about security.
There’s no security infrastructure there for us to build on, and until there is I can’t see how financial services organisations can do real business in this new space: allowing my car to buy its own fuel seems a long way away when hackers can p0wn cars through the interweb tubes. I finished my talk with some optimism about new solutions by touching on the world of shared ledgers. I’m not the only one who thinks that there may be a connection between these two categories of new, unexplored and yet to be fully understood technology.
Although I’m a little skeptical of the oft-cited connection between blockchains and the Internet of Things, I think this might be where a strong such synergy lies.
The reason for my suspicion that there may be a relationship here is that one of the characteristics of shared ledger technology is that in an interesting way it makes the virtual world more like the mundane world. In the mundane world, there is only one of something. There’s only one of the laptops that I’m writing this post on and there’s only one of the chairs that I’m sitting on and there is only one of the rooms that I’m sitting in. In the mundane world you can’t clone things. But in the virtual world, you can. If you have a virtual object, it’s just some data and you can make as many copies of it as you want.
A shared ledger technology, however, can make the virtual emulate the mundane in the sense that if there is a ledger entry recording that I have some data, then if I transfer the data to you, it’s now yours and no longer mine. The obvious example of this in practice is of course bitcoin where this issue of replication is the “double spending problem” well known to electronic money mavens.
Snippings 