Blockchain usage in smart home

Question

I am currently gathering information for my thesis about smart home implementaton with a use of blockchain. The blockchain usage is a requirement from my thesis supervisor and I have huge problem with finding out how blockchain technology may be useful in home automation.

What I have already considered is that there are two types of blockchain which I can use: private and public.

The public blockchain won't be useful at all, because of long time to achieve consensus and every transaction costs money (fee for miners).

I also don't see any adventage of private blockchain over regular database in such application. There are two reasons:

-I won't be able to store blockchain on every smart home device, because they all have limited space. So If I need to store blockchain in some centralised way, I think it looses it's immutability adventage.

-The public key cryptography is a very nice thing, but I can archieve that also in a regular database, so I don't see the need to implement blockchain for that.

So am I not seeing something? How use of blockchain may be helpful is such a small project?

Thanks in advance for any advice! :)

Answer 1

I think it is related to developing because it always begins to make the right choice to use blockchain for smart home devices. There are blockchains out there which have a focus for devices with small storage, for example, IOTA.

As far as I understand you are looking for a solution that doesn't have a SPoF (Single Point of Failure) and which is decentralized, without using the storage of the device.

Personally, I think BigChainDB ( https://www.bigchaindb.com/developers/getstarted/ ) can be the best solution for you. Setup some nodes and let the devices authenticate with it though MongoDB or simplify it with API access. It's a great base for deploying decentralized applications, such as yours.