This is an important question since the focus of the article's speculation is on the Internet of things. Obviously embedded devices are not going to be lugging around gigabytes of blockchain any time soon. Even with pruning you're not going to get the size down to a realistic number for devices with little to no hard drive capacity.

I imagine in any IoT scenario, a fleet of sensors talks to a trusted central hub. If Bitcoin is involved then the hub could run the wallet and the sensors could delegate transactions to it.