Vision of an augmented physical world
Once I found myself asking how much I value reality. I mean, the property of being real, of being existent, of being an entity measurable in our observable universe. Of course we start badly, since defining what it means to be real is something tricky, to say the least (for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that the simulation hypothesis is wrong). But assuming a definition of reality reasonably close to common sense, I’m pretty confident of the answer. Being confronted between real and imaginary, I value much more what can be imagined. I find imagination immensely more powerful than reality, since for every real object we can associate an infinite amount of non existent entities. In my view reality it’s not an a priori good property to have, it can be perfectly fine to exist just in principle (That is way to me Anselm’s Ontological argument can be dismissed easily). That said is also very intriguing to study what is real, and that is called physics.
The digital world is amazing. Free from our physical boundaries we can communicate, learn and interact, irrespectively of our limitations. It is the closest thing to imagination that we can get. Fundamentally we are lifted by limitations such as the cost of moving ourselves; it’s much cheaper to move a bunch of photons and electrons than clusters of molecules. The possibility of communicating faster allowed the growth of networks, of which the World Wide Web is arguably an amazing example. Entering these networks enhance our capabilities, make us able to be part of something huge, while retaining our independence. This is particularly true in network that are decentralized, in which every entry point enjoys the same benefits.
Today the physical world lags behind the digital world: it is static, unable to exchange value. This is a missed opportunity. Indeed even though these worlds appear so different, there are fundamental concepts which are substrate invariant and do not care about composition or location. Notions like identity, ownership, access and lifecycle can be equally applied to software or hardware. Physical objects can and should enjoy the same freedom and decentralization of the digital world. Sharing access to a bike should be as simple changing the permission access to a file in the cloud. Transferring the ownership of a flat should be as handy and definitive as sending a Bitcoin transaction. Manufacturing and transport of goods should be as transparent as the commit history on GitHub.
The good news is that all of this is possible and is going to happen soon: two enabling technologies will bring us there. Firstly we need to connect physical assets with the digital world, to leverage all the nice properties of the latter. The idea of connecting things around us is dubbed as Internet of Things. What we see today is just the tip of the iceberg, the real revolution will start when sensors and connected devices will be so energy efficient that they will be able to fully harvest their energy from the environment. When that happens, sensors will be literally everywhere and objects around us will be augmented. By the way, the next cellular standard have been made with IoT in mind; I predict a further acceleration of IoT adoption when 5G will go live.
The second enabler is the blockchain. The blockchain, very roughly speaking an immutable ledger of transactions, it’s needed to solve the problems that IoT introduces and to make the IoT really decentralized. The biggest issue is that IoT is connecting the physical world with everyone, including malicious actors! It’s clear that having your car exposed to a 15-years old hacker in search of some fun it’s not ideal. One of the core reasons is that IoT it is not able to run the full blown security features of more powerful computers, therefore devices are constantly at risk of being hacked. Another is that updates and fixes are often cumbersome. Using blockchain as the IoT backbone will make hacking of IoT devices impractical, as it’s impractical to reverse a Bitcoin transaction. See this previous article of mine for further viewpoints on IoT and Blockchain.
With this spirit in mind, I founded AnyLedger. We believe that the concrete way to fulfill this vision of physical-digital fusion is to make every IoT device, including very low foot print ones, a blockchain hardware wallet. We provide the full stack to make every IoT device resilient and able to communicate with the blockchain. Looking forward to a world in which is easy for objects to interact with each other, exchange value, communicate with people. An augmented physical world, much closer to the power of our imagination.
