This has been a great thread to read - a lot of research has focused on more incremental improvements and points regarding to mechanism or design, but real world use cases are not isolated, research that focuses on connecting the dots and utilizing all elements of emerging tech such as the articles cited in this thread will be the applications we’ll see.
A couple points that may be of interest to this thread
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Helium, a telecom based project may be a good example of connecting IoT with blockchain. Traditionally IoT networks have been difficult to develop because of the startup and incentive costs to maintain a network, Helium has used blockchain economics and incentive structures to help with this (miners and validators process and host their local network for IoT device in exchange for token rewards)
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Other shifts to think about that all are developing in parallel - the 5G rollout will enable far higher throughput of information transfer / compute and lower latency and the transition onto the Cloud for most applications will complement AI / IoT use cases (and many would argue is the infrastructure needed to enable the next generation of industrial or city-wide AI/IoT)
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Although the use cases of blockchain are exciting, one small critique in the paper would be that the researchers don’t exact answer the question of why a blockchain (as opposed to just a normal database) would be the best solution to some of these problems. We’re seeing for example the development of private LTE networks for smart cities or for utilities to monitor their service deliver with IoT, with blockchain potentially being a slower and more expensive solution due to consensus needs and node hosting. One would argue with the need for security that instead of a public blockchain a permissioned blockchain would be utilized, but at that point the line blurs between what one may define a blockchain to be
An interesting paper regarding 5G and Blockchain is this one here for anyone interested in a read:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335518169_Blockchain_for_5G_Opportunities_and_Challenges