Book Image

Hands-On IoT Solutions with Blockchain

By : Maximiliano Santos, Enio Moura
Book Image

Hands-On IoT Solutions with Blockchain

By: Maximiliano Santos, Enio Moura

Overview of this book

Blockchain has been the hot topic of late thanks to cryptocurrencies. To make matters more interesting, the financial market is looking for ways to reduce operational costs and generate new business models, and this is where blockchain solutions come into the picture. In addition to this, with Internet of Things (IoT) trending and Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other devices flooding the market, you can now create cheap devices even at home. Hands-On IoT Solutions with Blockchain starts with an overview of IoT concepts in the current business scenario. It then helps you develop your own device on the IBM Watson IoT platform and create your fi rst IoT solution using Watson and Intel Edison.Once you are familiar with IoT, you will learn about Blockchain technology and its use cases. You will also work with the Hyperledger framework and develop your own Blockchain network. As you progress through the chapters, you'll work with problem statements and learn how to design your solution architecture so that you can create your own integrated Blockchain and IoT solution. The next set of chapters will explain how to implement end-to-end Blockchain solutions with IoT using the IBM Cloud platform. By the end of this book, you will have mastered the convergence of IoT and Blockchain technology and exploited the best practices and drivers to develop a bulletproof integrated solution.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

What is blockchain?


Let’s take a more in-depth look at what blockchain really is. An asset consists of anything that is capable of being owned or controlled to produce value. The assets are the protagonists of this network, and can include tangible assets such as cars, houses, or money. They can also include intangible assets such as copyrights and patents. If the assets are the protagonist, then the ledger is the key. The ledger is a business's system of records. Businesses will have multiple ledgers for multiple business networks in which they participate.

The following diagram represents the status quo for business networks. Each participant keeps their own ledger(s), which are updated to represent business transactions as they occur:

With blockchain technology, members of a business network share a ledger that is updated every time a transaction occurs through peer-to-peer replication, as depicted in the following diagram:

Blockchain allows multiple competing parties to securely interact...