Cars with secure ID

Mercedes Benz parent company Daimler has partnered with blockchain firm Riddle & Code to produce a hardware wallet for automobiles.Long term, the business alliance looks to provide solutions for self-driving vehicles and car-sharing platforms, relay traffic patterns in real-time, mesh with smart city infrastructure, and transfer accident information to the proper authorities and insurance providers.The wallet, a tamper-resistant piece of hardware that was presented at Startupautobahn in Stuttgart, creates a cryptographic identity for vehicles. It also integrates with the vehicle’s telematic control unit (TCU) to receive, sign, and attest to sensory data from the car and surrounding infrastructure.This information can be used to record a vehicle’s performance and ensure it received proper maintenance. Once the backend is fully operational, Daimler Financial Services will look the group’s car business units, including its trucks, luxury cars, and buses to integrate the hardware.

This one did not occur to me, and it is a great idea. The car obeys the contract, the driver agrees to the contract when they register the car.  But certainly, the tech will allow the user to load other, enforceable contracts. Insurance by the mile, for example, is now available on a voluntary basis, as are gas taxes, by the mile. If you buy a used car, you can ask to see the maintenance history, or wonder why not.

The device is tamper proof, it meets our conditions to hold bearer assets.  Now AppleID has a competitor. Will Alphabet be far behind?  Do we have a deal with the NSA yet?  Does Congress understand what a digital bearer asset is?

Daimier says,Once the backend is fully operational, OK that means they are building a liquidity net, a secure network covering all the automobile transaction happening.  That would definitely include a trading pit for used cars, the trades being mostly prequaled and subject to auto pricing. So they have invented the car trading pit, another new industry and disruptive to the old.  Another pit they enable is the ubers and lyfts, drivers having the new secure ID can guarantee GPS, reliability frequency, it is all in the secure app and available to riders upon volition by the driver.

Good stuff, pure sandbox.