Decentralized systems (e.g., blockchain systems) have the potential to revolutionize financial and payment systems, as well as the internet — for the good of humankind and planet Earth. This position paper aims at justifying this standpoint and at laying out a vision for the future of decentralized computing.

Blockchain networks have attracted tremendous attention for creating cryptocurrencies and decentralized economies built on peer-to-peer protocols. However, the complex nature of the dynamics and feedback mechanisms within these economic networks has rendered it difficult to reason about the growth and evolution of these networks.

A flexible Wireless Sensor Network platform for implementation of diverse applications has been developed and deployed at Instituto Superior Tecnico – Technical University of Lisbon (IST-TUL). Since its initial deployment in 2007, this testbed has grown steadily, supporting new nodes, applications and experiments.

Opportunistic wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently been proposed as solutions for many remote monitoring problems. Many such problems, including environmental monitoring, involve large deployment scenarios with lower-than-average node density, as well as a long time scale and limited budgets.