Blockchain technology is powering our future. As the technology behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, open software platforms like Ethereum, and disruptive companies like Ripple, it’s too important to ignore.
In this revelatory book, Don Tapscott, the bestselling author of Wikinomics, and his son, blockchain expert Alex Tapscott, bring us a brilliantly researched, highly readable, and essential book about the technology driving the future of the economy.
Blockchain is the ingeniously simple, revolutionary protocol that allows transactions to be simultaneously anonymous and secure by maintaining a tamperproof public ledger of value. Though it’s best known as the technology that drives bitcoin and other digital currencies, it also has the potential to go far beyond currency, to record virtually everything of value to humankind, from birth and death certificates to insurance claims, land titles, and even votes.
Blockchain is also essential to understand if you’re an artist who wants to make a living off your art, a consumer who wants to know where that hamburger meat really came from, an immigrant who’s tired of paying big fees to send money home to your loved ones, or an entrepreneur looking for a new platform to build a business. And those examples are barely the tip of the iceberg.
As with major paradigm shifts that preceded it, blockchain technology will create winners and losers. This book shines a light on where it can lead us in the next decade and beyond.
DON TAPSCOTT is the CEO of the Tapscott Group and one of the most influential living theorists about business and society. In November 2013, Thinkers50 named Don as the 4th most important business thinker in the world. A June 2013 Forbes.com analysis of social media identified Don as the most influential management thinker in the world. He is the author or co-author of 15 widely read books about new technologies and new media in business and society, including Wikinomics and The Digital Economy.
ALEX TAPSCOTT is the CEO and founder of Northwest Passage Ventures, an advisory firm building blockchain companies. In 2014 he wrote the seminal report on governing digital currencies for the Global Solutions Network program at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Prior to founding Northwest Passage Ventures, he worked for seven years in investment banking in New York and Toronto.
