The Inevitable Trend of Internet Technology Innovation:
The Value Internet of Things
We are in an era where new technologies lead to social changes. In the age of information and the Internet, human collaboration and communication break through time and space constraints, and the world becomes an overall interactive platform.
In recent years, the Internet has entered a new business format of “Internet +”. In this stage, a new form of economic and social development of “Internet + all traditional industries” driven by knowledge and social innovation 2.0 provides a broad network platform for the reform, innovation and development of various industries.
At present, the information age is entering an unprecedented important stage of development where the objects can be connected to each other through the Internet; this stage is called the third wave of the development of the world information industry following the computer and the Internet: the age of the Internet of Things (IoT). Internet of Things technology contains two meanings: first, the core and foundation of the Internet of Things is still the Internet, the Internet of Things is an extension of the Internet; second, the client side of the Internet of Things extends to the information exchange and communication between any objects, which is so called object-to-object interrelation.
However, from the Internet, to the “Internet +” and then to the Internet of things, all stages have failed to solve the problem of localization of information dissemination (e.g. centralization). It is difficult for the Internet of things under the current central structure to accomplish the real autonomous cooperation and effective transactions, because the relevant parties of such cooperation and transactions often belong to different stakeholders with complex and uncertain trust relationship. Therefore, the collaboration and transactions of the current Internet of Things devices can only be carried out under the same trust domain, the devices to collaborate and trade must be provided or verified by the same Internet of Things service provider, which significantly reduces the true commercial value of the Internet of Things applications.
In this context, we put forward the concept of the “Value Internet of Things (VIoT)”, focusing on introducing the blockchain technology into the Internet of things, to solve the problem of centralization facing the development process of the Internet of Things. The blockchain is a decentralized transaction record & storage technology based on cryptographic principles; with a distributed point-to-point network, it can achieve the permanent storage of orderly transaction record which is undeletable, tamper-resistant, open and traceable, so it is recognized as the best choice to meet the above challenges. In the ecology of the blockchain, people can trade safely without trust established in advance, because every transaction is well recorded in the “public ledger” of the blockchain, which is a perfect solution to the trust and equity issues of the Internet virtual world. The inevitable trends of the Value Internet of Things are shown in Figure 1.1.
Waltonchain
