There are many incentives to combine IoT trusted device operations with Bitcoin's blockchain. Even beyond the most recent ambitions of IBM and their ADEPT project:
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s15/sh/a0b8847e-0cd7-4748-8b4d-396c39558c35/200022bfb620e02d .
Yes, IBM's team is rather considering an alternative blockchain - case given: Ethereum - but to think about the challenges to embed device verification into Bitcoin is an interesting mind-game.
Out there are estimations that till 2030 up to 100 billion IoT devices will be operational. Now consider that all these devices will not only have to be represented by ECDSA keys but also by at least one basic bitcoin transaction for every single device and another key to represent it's producer or service provider.
Now consider this basic IoT related tx will be implemented as a multi signature tx. so at least 0,0001 btc will have to be transferred to the multisigaddress and will then be bound to a specific device for many years.
So around 10 mln btc will be taken out of of the pool of available money assets. That's half of all ever existing btcoins; quite something.
Then also consider the potential time it would take to verify these transactions. Keep in mind that the bitcoin network operates with quite some restrictions. The maximum amount of individual transactions in a block runs these days between 300 to 600 tx in average. This way it would take decades just to get the device addresses into the blockchain. Regarding the recent implementation of classical Bitcoin technology bitcoin is not ready for this challenge.
On the other side in case IoT is going to be successful it will require a distributed consensus and trust platform. If this is not going to be Bitcoin it will be a different platform. But whatever platform will be up to this challenge will also constitute the better platform for a crypto/mathematical currency of the future.
Therefore IoT could define the first disruptive moment for bitcoin.
What do you think?
