I think if cryptocurrency were ever "officially" adopted it would be a centralized model anyway. Something like Ripple or that proposed Canadian cryptocurrency.
With a centralized model, there's no need for miners or mining, because you trust the system that you run. And transactions could be extremely fast.
Basically, it would look a lot like a bank with an API and public/private key signatures, running on a regular old database. Governments would probably love this, in fact, since it would prevent the cash economy from stealing their tax revenue.
You may or may not consider this "cryptocurrency", but then again most "blockchain" companies these days are just using it as a fancy database. Why do IOT devices monitoring production of $PRODUCT need to sync a blockchain? Why not just have them hit a REST API that is controlled by the client? Again, you can presumably always trust yourself/your company, so the trustless part doesn't add much value, and for a lot of this stuff there is no real need for consensus-resolution type functionality that the Bitcoin part provides.
If all you need is Merkle trees... those have been around for what, 40 years now? Bitcoin didn't invent them, Ralph Merkle did.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2016/06/16/canada-has...
With a centralized model, there's no need for miners or mining, because you trust the system that you run. And transactions could be extremely fast.
Basically, it would look a lot like a bank with an API and public/private key signatures, running on a regular old database. Governments would probably love this, in fact, since it would prevent the cash economy from stealing their tax revenue.
You may or may not consider this "cryptocurrency", but then again most "blockchain" companies these days are just using it as a fancy database. Why do IOT devices monitoring production of $PRODUCT need to sync a blockchain? Why not just have them hit a REST API that is controlled by the client? Again, you can presumably always trust yourself/your company, so the trustless part doesn't add much value, and for a lot of this stuff there is no real need for consensus-resolution type functionality that the Bitcoin part provides.
If all you need is Merkle trees... those have been around for what, 40 years now? Bitcoin didn't invent them, Ralph Merkle did.