Soon your home will be alive like the enchanted castle in Beauty and the Beast.

It won't be long before your furniture is smart too. Even your clothes will one day be connected to the Internet. Soon your home will be alive and at your service like the enchanted castle in Beauty and the Beast, where a talking teapot, a singing candelabra and a caring mantel clock are eager to please. For those of you that still rail against the Facebook privacy settings, your data might be collected by every device surrounding you in the near future.

And this is what has been dampening the enthusiasm about these new developments so far. The so-called 'Internet of Things' (IoT) is raising many questions regarding the consumer’s privacy: What will happen with the data accumulated by our furniture? What data will be collected, and how? Where will it be sent,and who gets access to it? Recently a new idea has been making the rounds that could offer an answer to these privacy concerns. Surprisingly, the idea relies on a technology from a totally different context: Bitcoins.

Sound geeky to you? You have never heard of the IoT or Bitcoins before? Here is a short introduction to what will happen to your home in the near future and what could be a good solution for protecting your privacy.

Making the things we own do more for us

“Making the things we own do more for us” is the idea behind the Internet of Things. The term was first used in 1999 to refer to the idea of linking physical objects with the Internet infrastructure. Today, the Internet of Things has generally found application in the industrial and agricultural sectors and in transportation.

A new idea could offer an answer to these privacy concerns.

But soon it will be extended to household appliances and clothes. These smart devices will measure our daily behavior, like our eating and sleeping habits, while connected clothes known as wearables measure our body movements, our heart rate, our blood pressure, etc. The accumulated data can be used to make industry, agriculture and private households more efficient, assist in health care and improve transportation. There is a vast and yet to be discovered variety of applications of the IoT.

Is this a bit difficult to imagine? Just think of your habit of making every Thursday Disney movie night. After a while your furniture has registered this pattern in your behavior and on next Thursday evening, your TV has already downloaded a list of new Disney movies, your popcorn machine has already prepared you a bag, and your lamp has dimmed down to fairytale mood lighting.

People like to compare the development of the IoT with that of the Internet. According to IT market researcher Gartner, there are already 3.8 billion smart objects today. In not even five years, the IoT will consist of 26 billion devices. (Some researchers even speak of 30 to 50 billion by 2020.) Compare this to the circulation of 2.6 billion smartphones today, and the approximately 6.1 billion smartphones predicted by 2020, or with the current world population of 7.36 billion today, and the estimated world population of 8.08 billion by 2020.