Book Image

Mastering IOT

By : Colin Dow, Perry Lea
Book Image

Mastering IOT

By: Colin Dow, Perry Lea

Overview of this book

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the fastest growing technology market. Industries are embracing IoT technologies to improve operational expenses, product life, and people's well-being. We’ll begin our journey with an introduction to Raspberry Pi and quickly jump right into Python programming. We’ll learn all concepts through multiple projects, and then reinforce our learnings by creating an IoT robot car. We’ll examine modern sensor systems and focus on what their power and functionality can bring to our system. We’ll also gain insight into cloud and fog architectures, including the OpenFog standards. The Learning Path will conclude by discussing three forms of prevalent attacks and ways to improve the security of our IoT infrastructure. By the end of this Learning Path, we will have traversed the entire spectrum of technologies needed to build a successful IoT system, and will have the confidence to build, secure, and monitor our IoT infrastructure. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: Internet of Things Programming Projects by Colin Dow Internet of Things for Architects by Perry Lea
Table of Contents (34 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
The IoT Story
Index

Blockchains and cryptocurrencies in IoT


Blockchains are public, digital, and decentralized ledgers or cryptocurrency transactions. The original cryptocurrency blockchain was Bitcoin but there are over 700 new currencies on the market such as Ethereum, Ripple, and Dash. The power of a blockchain is that there is no single entity controlling the state of transactions. It also forces redundancy in the system by ensuring everyone using a blockchain also maintains a copy of the ledger. Assuming there is no inherent trust in blockchain participants, the system must live in consensus. 

A good question to ask is if we have solved identity management and security with asymmetric cryptography and key exchanges, why are blockchains needed to exchange data or currency?  This is not enough for the exchange of money or data of value. One thing to note is that since the inception of information theory, when two devices communicate, Bob and Alice, they send a message or a bit of data. That information is...