The Blockchain Beat: Global IoT Summit Dublin 2022

Dublin’s IoT Week finally kicked off on 20 June 2022, an event originally planned for 2020 but rescheduled twice due to covid-related complications.

Spirits were high during the opening reception, the Lord Mayor of Dublin even appeared and welcomed the delegates with open arms for the first time in two years.

“We have 600 fantastic delegates. IoT is something that we largely promote as a city. We have integrated it into our way of working as a local council, so it is fantastic. I look forward to learning more from the discussions taking place here, and also to meeting some of our delegates,” Lord Mayor Alison Gilliland shared with me.

The Global IoT Summit was a big part of Dublin’s IoT Week education schedule, with both Latif Ladid, President of the IPv6 Forum and Dr. Craig Wright, Chief Scientist at nChain, as keynote speakers. The pair covered limitations of IPv4 (Internet Protocol Version Four) and how Dr. Wright’s vision for Bitcoin and the ability to conduct peer-to-peer transactions will allow the improved IPv6 to reach its full potential.

During Ladid’s keynote, he explained how the internet’s original end-to-end model has been disrupted, the consequences of the disruption and why IPv6 is necessary for an IoT-driven world.

“Now it’s not safe between people. That is why even our emails are not secure. This is really very bad,” Ladid elaborated after his presentation.

“But I think IPv6 will restore the end-to-end model that allows us in this case to go for very large applications. And one of them is, in this case, blockchain and BSV,” he revealed.

Immediately following Ladid’s keynote, Dr. Wright delivered his keynote address, diving into how Bitcoin enables internet users to communicate directly and return to the functionality we can achieve with IPv6.

“You can actually scale things out, fragment and store parts of the network everywhere instead of having big central servers, Facebook, Google, Amazon. Of course, now you can actually have everything stored in a distributed way, the way the Internet was originally promised to be,” said Dr. Wright in his speech.

“The original implementation [of Bitcoin] that I released in 2009 is very different from what you see now. The method that people stopped distributing was basically a person directly communicating with the IP address of another person. By doing that, that’s how you have peer to peer that allows you to scale very, very quickly and very easily,” he explained.

“With IoT devices, this is going to become more and more important,” Dr. Wright added.

In addition to covering the synergies between IPv6 and the original Bitcoin protocol, the Global IoT Summit featured a handful of panels with a blockchain focus, including how the technology can alleviate pain points in the food supply chain.

“Basically, the current arrangement we have now in the food supply chain is very inefficient, if not very miserable,” said Ladid, moderator of two blockchain and food supply chain panels at the event.

“We already have a Ponzi scheme in the food supply chain … and the reason for that is that even though we have regulations, the regulators know how to fix these things, but they don’t have the tools to track and trace these things,” Ladid explained .

“So we need to create these tools for the regulator to identify, verify, track and trace where these products are coming from and so on. And I think there’s tremendous work to be done in this area,” he said.

Speaking on one of Ladid’s panels, Srdjan Krco, CEO of DunavNET and VP of IoT Forum, talked about the blockchain-based solutions currently being worked on within the food supply chain.

“For blockchain perspectives, one of the partners in the consortium is our colleagues from OriginTrail or Trace Labs, and they’ve been working in this blockchain domain for quite a few years. And what we’re now using in the project and what they’re also building outside the project is this sophisticated knowledge graph which sits on top of a blockchain layer,” Krco revealed.

“We’re using this knowledge graph as a way where we can sort of store a subset of data and make it searchable and use blockchain at the bottom to make it immutable and reliable,” he said.

While the use of blockchain technology for the food supply chain and in partnership with IPv6 sounds perfect in theory, professionals working in the IoT space still have a lot to learn about blockchain, how it can help their projects and what the misconceptions are.

“There’s no question right now about its public knowledge and a lot of the knowledge, it’s there,” Subhasis Thakur, research fellow, National University of Ireland, said of the delegates’ familiarity with blockchain.

“Basically, there’s a misunderstanding that what we’re putting on the blockchain is correct, so that needs to be corrected. The data you’re putting on the blockchain might not be correct. So you need additional steps, additional control, a decent audit procedure to make sure that “What you put into the blockchain is correct,” he said.

“In this place, [delegates] is more IoT, they are researchers in the IoT sector, they have never associated it with what they can do with blockchain,” Ladid added.

“Especially with what’s happening with BTC, it scares a lot of people. That’s why they’re not ready to touch it. These are sensible people. They don’t fall into these traps,” he said.

“So now we see that what we were joking about is that maybe the BTC bubble is going to burst just a couple of months ago, now it’s happened. Nobody’s talking about it. It was a real crash,” Ladid added.

Watch: Dr. Craig Wright’s keynote at the Global IoT Summit in Dublin

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