Enterprise Bitcoin and the Brain as a CryptoCurrency Network

If Dell, New Egg, and TigerDirect now accept Bitcoin, and Paypal's CEO contemplates the same, eBay and Amazon might also accept Bitcoin in the not too distant future, and this would start to really push cryptocurrency into the mainstream. Faster still if Google Wallet were to join. Bitcoin seems to be 'going enterprise' (= key step to mainstream) as fast as the Internet-of-things (Enterprise IOT: Microsoft, Ernst & Young, etc. offering connected POS (point of sale) networks and all 'devices' as an IOT service to businesses). However, even though Bitcoin in its entirety is a radically new concept, from a vendor standpoint, accepting Bitcoin is not a big deal - it is analogous to accepting any other kind of payment mechanism. Anyone (individual or enterprise) receiving, or wanting to pay out in Bitcoin can easily convert national currencies via Coinbase, bitpay, or other sites, or now the purported (as of July 2014) 33 worldwide Robocoin Bitcoin ATMs. Conceptually, Bitcoin is a payment mechanism for vendors, but for money businesses like banks, it is much more critical to develop explicit Bitcoin strategies and policies.

However, there is still much risk in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin as a currency is still new and volatile, and it is not clear if it is a faddish or persistent transformation, although the concept may have considerable resiliency even if specific cryptocurrencies do not (i.e.; Baconcoin). Also, there is only about $8 billion USD in Bitcoin now, and it would need to be on the order of $50-100 billion USD to receive more serious financial consideration. The currency does have a number of important features that could propel acceptance including architecture (psuedo-anonymous and trustless), openness, low-cost (eliminates currency exchange costs), and fungible worldwide availability. As Kevin Kelly points out, Bitcoin is not just a payment mechanism, it is a revolutionary way to enable collaboration at an unprecedented scale. Bitcoin is the reinvention of the institution of capital. Further, in the automation economy, Bitcoin is automated and open accounting; a transparent ledger. The concept of Bitcoin and its architecture and operation is a new model which is not unlike the brain, where (at minimum) many functions are handled automatically, and there is a certain modular aspect to function. Bitcoin might be a universal mathematical model of nature that human intelligence is just now discovering.

Enterprise IoT: Connected Product User Communities

A key hurdle point for any newtech’s becoming truly mainstream is adoption by the enterprise market. The newtech innovates its way into a variety of business applications geared to improve efficiency and save time and money. This is not just internally to the enterprise, but as a widespread feature of products and services offered. Some examples are the Internet, email, video conferencing, IP telephony, virtual worlds, and wikis.

One big shift is towards making all products connected. This means actually connected via sensors, not just a website to look up for product information and customer services. This is revolutionary to businesses because immediately, every product can be transformed from a one-off shelf purchase to an ongoing service that is part of social community.

Every product can be a relationship with the consumer. 

Connected products can phone home with continuous information about product usage and failure (most ethically with customer opt-in).

Just like the ability to interact with content on websites and engage in social networking with other users became an expectation with web properties, product user communities have already been evolving to be more interactive with product web sites, Facebook pages and likes, Twitter accounts, and sometimes fan fiction. Connected product user communities is the next step and it could be giant. If the requisite infrastructure is in place, connected products could deploy quickly because of the more intimate relationship vendors perceive as attainable with consumers from the high-resolution continuous information exchange.

IoT ecology design is crucial. IoT sensors must operate in concert with other communications networks, but their low power requirements could draw from the existing infrastructure of the user’s wearable ecosystem (smartphone, smartwatch, wearable display (Glass), wifi, cloud), smarthome (Nest, Hive, Tado, etc.), automotive data networks, and other IoT tracking infrastructure. With IoT sensors, the 10:1 ratio of person to connected devices could quickly exponentiate to 100:1. The IoT ecosystem requires an architecture that is quite different from the Internet’s packets, redundancy, lookups, and TCPIP switching, a design that can accommodate higher bursts in traffic, data input from sensor clouds (a sensor landscape acting like a school of fish), and more kinds and types of data transmission, but can also power share, massively distribute, and intercommunicate.