Radical Trust: How Blockchain Liberates the Next Economy

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. The Economist 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.