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Micropayment with Blockchain in the Internet of things
At a glance
Many use cases from the Internet of things (IoT) become even more practical if the devices involved can exchange payments among themselves. This enables people to use devices or have devices perform tasks for them autonomously, without having to worry about paying for even the smallest transactions. This accelerates the processes enormously and makes them less complicated in everyday life. Often, for example, it is a question of paying a usage fee for an exactly defined period of time or for exactly one usage. In connection with IoT, micropayment is a payment concept that refers to transactions between two devices (machine to machine; M2M). In general, micropayment means the payment of very small amounts in the range between cents and a few euros.
Blockchain technology for machine to machine payments
IoT devices execute their autonomous payments online using block-chain-based technology such as the lightning network. There are even crypto currencies such as IOTA, which were explicitly developed for machine-to-machine transactions. Due to its blockchain alternative - the tangle - IOTA is particularly suitable for numerous parallel transactions. The system does not implement a hardware-intensive proof of work as a consensus model (i.e. for the validation of transactions) and should be able to scale practically indefinitely without sacrificing performance. These characteristics are very important for machine to machine payments: machine micropayments should not fail because the payment network is overloaded, or a device has difficulties with the consensus model due to limited hardware. This is because autonomous devices can come to a standstill and noticeably disrupt the smooth operation of the automatisms.
Advantages of micropayment
Micropayments open up numerous opportunities in industry and everyday life for making automatic processes even more autonomous and thus making them even more practical for human users.
Autonomous transactions
M2M transactions can take place without human intervention. And this makes the process more convenient for people, as many transactions can be controlled automatically in this way. In the future, micropayments could be used, for example, to allow an IoT-capable car to pay for things such as parking fees or the cost of a full tank of fuel on its own.
Time saving
Autonomous payments accelerate transactions because there is no need to wait for human input. Valid payments are also usually authorized within the shortest possible time, so that the desired transactions can be carried out very quickly overall.
Cost savings
Micropayments occur autonomously between two machines and can therefore be used very precisely, e.g. to pay the fee for a borrowed device per use or per second after its useful life.
Payment with ROBIOTIC
At ROBIOTIC, we naturally make use of the advantages of micropayment and integrate it into the IoT projects of our customers on request. As part of the holistic approach of our ROBIOTIC.CONCEPT, the topic of payment plays an important role in the realization of IoT projects. For our customers, we develop multi-level billing systems and dynamically configurable billing systems that are individually adapted to the internal sales structures of the company.
Your IoT project becomes a solid business case? Here you can find out everything about payment at ROBIOTIC.
