Radical Trust

Blockchain technology, one of the most buzzed-about yet least understood technological innovations of recent years, is at a point similar to where the Internet was in the mid-1990s or peer-to-peer file-sharing services were in the late 1990s: ready for takeoff. TheEconomist has cited blockchain's "extraordinary potential" in business, since it enables people who have no particular confidence in each other to collaborate without having to go through a neutral central authority. Simply put, blockchain is "a machine for creating trust...A shared public ledger, an apparently mundane process (like double-entry book-keeping and the joint stock company) that has the potential to transform how people and businesses cooperate."

Blockchain is the technology underlying bitcoin. But that cryptocurrency application is both a curiosity and small potatoes compared to the broader and more important applications of blockchain technology that are starting to develop. Fundamentally, a blockchain is a ledger for recording transactions. Unlike a traditional ledger, however, a blockchain database is transparent--anyone online can read, but not alter, its contents. It's a distributed database, so the information it stores is spread among many computers around the world, making it difficult to destroy.

Thanks to the brilliant design work of its pseudonymous creator, a blockchain database resists any subsequent manipulation of its stored transactions, even by the owners of the computers it is stored on. When it comes to anything from a stock trade to a copyright registration about, say, a song, or whether a particular transaction happened on Monday or Tuesday, blockchain enables you to be certain.

Lisa Gansky's book will be an overview for "the rest of us," i.e. the non-techies who will need to understand the potential of blockchain and how it can be put to work. Its potential in business--from financial services, to governmental records, to entrepreneurs with intellectual property concerns--is about to be unleashed.