IoT Will Drive The Future of Commerce - How Do Cryptos Fit In?

A new Visa study, co-sponsored by PYMNTS.com, indicates more than 80% of Americans have a strong willingness in using connected devices to make purchases. Further, respondents placed a high value on the security, specifically data privacy and order accuracy. Full report has been linked below.

http://www.pymnts.com/how-we-will-pay/

While the study does not get into Blockchain and cryptocurrencies (after all, Visa is the primary beneficiary of status quo market conditions), the IoT certainly has strong ties to cryptocurrencies and underlying blockchain technology. In fact, IBM is marketing the IoT and blockchain hand-in-hand.

https://www.ibm.com/internet-of-things/platform/private-blockchain/

An article posted on the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) gets right at this point:

Current IoT ecosystems rely on centralized, brokered communication models, otherwise known as the server/client paradigm. All devices are identified, authenticated and connected through cloud servers that sport huge processing and storage capacities. Connections between devices have to exclusively go through the internet, even if they happen to be a few feet apart.

While this model has connected generic computing devices for decades and will continue to support small-scale IoT networks as we see them today, it will not be able to respond to the growing needs of the huge IoT ecosystems of tomorrow.

Existing IoT solutions are expensive because of the high infrastructure and maintenance cost associated with centralized clouds, large server farms, and networking equipment. The sheer amount of communications that will have to be handled when there are tens of billions of IoT devices will increase those costs substantially.

Even if the unprecedented economic and engineering challenges are overcome, cloud servers will remain a bottleneck and point of failure that can disrupt the entire network.

The scalability and cost savings of blockchain make it an imperative for IoT: the two will co-exist going forward.

With that conclusion, which cryptocurrencies should be held to target long term growth?

For starters, Ethereum's smart contracting technology would be a nice bet, with Bitcoin providing a nice alternative. There is a need for rapid delivery of these solutions, and these cryptos are most widely accepted. Other currencies, such as Stellar and Ripple, serve different use cases. This is not to say XRP and STR are bad long term holds; they simply serve an entirely different use case.