U.S. retail giant Walmart[1] has applied for another patent, which describes the management of smart appliances using blockchain[2] technology, according to an application published[3] by the U.S.[4] Patent and Trademark Office August 2.
The application outlines systems and methods for managing a smart appliances such as a desktop or server computer, a kiosk, a tabletop device, or more portable computing devices, such as a wearable or gaming devices, laptop computers, or portable media players.
From a practical perspective, users will employ a device, whether it is wearable or not, that maintains the private key used to authorize a transaction[5]. One use case described was a kiosk for receiving packages from delivery drones:
“...a user may obtain a kiosk and add the newly obtained kiosk to the distributed ledger structure utilizing their smart device to provision and/or authorize the kiosk. In one example, the user device may be a wearable device that maintains the private key used to authorize the transaction. The kiosk may sync with the user device and be automatically provisioned as a home delivery station and added as a device in the distributed ledger[6] management system.”
The management environment will reportedly allow users to customize levels of access and control for the kiosk, including the ability to accept or decline a package or create and order an item.
In order to manage more smart appliances, the blockchain server network considers support of an Internet of Things[7] (IoT) ecosystem. “A resource in the IoT ecosystem may be associated with one or more roles and, thus, is associated with a single role in the context
