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Blockchain Revolution
Book

Blockchain Revolution

How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

Alex Tapscott and Don Tapscott
Portfolio, 2016
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

In this accessible guide, blockchain experts Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott explain the promise behind this emerging technology. They see blockchain as a potential world-changer, although their exuberance can feel a bit farfetched. Their report shines best when it shows how the new platform affects real people – for instance, when they document an immigrant’s expensive experience sending money overseas, and contrast that process with the graft-free ease of using a blockchain alternative. The authors cheerlead for the blockchain while acknowledging its possible pitfalls, including potential threats to privacy. getAbstract recommends this lively overview to investors and policy makers seeking to learn more about a cutting-edge technology.

Summary

Creating a “Trust Protocol”

Today, people and businesses can scarcely function without Internet access, email, cloud computing and mobile phone apps. Yet people still distrust one another online. Privacy and security remain major trouble spots.

Spammers, phishers, hackers, spies, “cyberbullies, datanappers” and other criminals thrive online. The growing area of blockchain technology offers a solution. Blockchain is an open-source platform that brings unprecedented transparency to electronic transactions. It allows strangers to exchange money securely without an intermediary like a bank, credit card issuer or PayPal. Blockchain creates a “trust protocol” that can pull Internet commerce out of the shadows.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the most famous illustration of the blockchain concept. The digital currency was created outside the purview of government treasuries and central banks. Bitcoin’s blockchain is different from the rest of the Internet in three main ways, in that bitcoin is:

  1. “Distributed” – No central management runs bitcoin. Its proprietary information does not reside on any primary database. Bitcoin operates through ...

About the Authors

CEO of the Tapscott Group Don Tapscott wrote the best-selling Wikinomics, The Digital Economy and other titles. Alex Tapscott is CEO of Northwest Passage Ventures.

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