The Super Imposition of The Internet-of-Things (IoT), Cryptography-of-Things (CoT), and Money-of-Things (MoT)

The Coming Revolution in Urban Transportation

Automation, efficiency, and variety gravitate humanity towards ever larger, ever more congested urbane areas where getting around is the one challenge that is being met by only seriously deficient solutions. Large chunks of our daily routine is lost in home to office transportation. Highways become parking lots, and country roads see ‘convoys’ of cars trailing one slow driver that cannot be passed. And when you arrive you have no place to park your car. But, no despair, help is on its way.

Will describe the technology ahead, first the picture: imagine a four lanes highway that is in ongoing conversation with the cars driving on it. The highway says to the cars: you can drive on lane #1 for free. But if you switch to lane #2, your digital wallet (fitted into your car) will be drained at a rate of x cents per mile. If you switch to lane #3, you will be paying 3x cents per mile, and lane #4 will cost you 8x cents /mile. The value of x will be adjusted real time to insure a desired speed gradient between the lanes. If the fast lanes are not fast enough then the value of x rises. If the fast lanes are too empty, the value of x comes down. Dynamically, the highway will optimize its task, and make money for its own, maintenance, expansion, and for better transportation solution.

Also imagine driving on a scenic wriggly country road stuck behind an unrushed driver, busy on the phone. Today you could be crawling behind this talker for an hour. But in the near future, your vehicle will offer him $x to momentarily move to the side to allow you to pass him. The talker will counter offer $y. If you accept, the deal is done. Everybody is happy.

In my city, early risers fill the city center parking garages, and the rest of us park in hinterland. The future parking garages will propose a deal to every car driving in the city. The signal will be captured by every vehicle which raised an electronic flag, saying: I wish to park as close as possible to some specified point A. The driver will readily sort among the various offers based on price and location. Once the driver accepts the offer (which includes an estimate of parking time), the garage confirms the spot much as it is done today with hotel reservations. Since all garages will see all the offers as beamed out in the city air, they will all adjust their offers competitively, and thereby allow the drivers to optimize between their convenience and their wallet.

Naturally these instant trade for efficiency and convenience will be equally effective for driver-less cars. Two technologies enhancing each other.

The technological framework for all these fantastic and fast approaching solutions is comprised of the Internet of Things, (IoT), Cryptography of Things, (CoT), and Money of Things, (MoT). The IoT will exploit the success of the Internet to establish intimate connectivity among tens of billions of ‘things’. The CoT will offer fast, secure, resilient cryptography to insure confidentiality, privacy, dependability, and to prevent smart fraudsters from taking advantage of this new reality. The MoT will be digital in nature, and cash-like, as opposed to account-like. Big difference: the coming urban transportation scenarios will allow thousands of communicating vehicles, roads and parking garages to self-organize themselves optimally by trading privileges against cash. As described, these deals will be ad-hoc, among strangers who happen to share a transportation landscape at a given moment. They can’t trade with IOUs (impossible to collect), they can’t get bogged down in lengthy payment card dialogues, they can’t trust a ‘thing’ with protecting account identity. The only way to allow traffic on the highway to sort itself out by drivers’ interest, is by instant trade-off of digital cash flowing in the air from payer to payee. The only way to buy the right to pass a vehicle ahead of you is by paying with cash for the deal (not exchange credit cards). The only way to allow vehicles to buy an available parking spot to be ready when they arrive is to load the parking vehicles with a digital wallet stuffed with cash that also represents the maximum potential loss. Car will not expose their owner’s account number — too risky. MoT will have to be digitized fiat currency. On top of all that dynamics it would be impossible to tolerate a bitcoin-like currency that trades wildly unevenly against the dollar. ‘Things’ will need their own money. BitMint.