BLOCKCHAIN REVOLUTION

This book explores the next big shift that will change the way we live online. Blockchain technology, the platform that powers bitcoin, permanently stores information without an intermediary like a bank or governing body.

Over thirty years, no theorist of the digital age has better explained the next big thing than Don Tapscott. In Wikinomics, Tapscott was the first to show how the Internet provides the first global platform for mass collaboration. Now, he writes about a profound technological shift that will change how the world does business—and everything else—using blockchain technology, which powers the digital currency Bitcoin.

The Internet as we know it is great for collaboration and communication, but it is deeply flawed when it comes to commerce and privacy. The new blockchain technology facilitates peer-to-peer transactions without any intermediary such as a bank or governing body. Keeping the user’s information anonymous, the blockchain validates and keeps a permanent public record of all transactions. That means that your personal information is private and secure, while all activity is transparent and incorruptible—reconciled by mass collaboration and stored in code on a digital ledger. With its advent, we will not need to trust each other in the traditional sense, because trust is built into the system itself.

Although many opportunities for the blockchain require a digital currency, Bitcoin is only one application of this great innovation in computer science. The blockchain can hold any legal document, from deeds and marriage licenses to educational degrees and birth certificates. Call it the World Wide Ledger. It enables smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations, decentralized government services, and transactions among things. The Internet of Everything needs a Ledger of Everything: The blockchain is a truly open, distributed, global platform that fundamentally changes what we can do online, how we do it, and who can participate.
In BLOCKCHAIN REVOLUTION, Don and Alex Tapscott explore how the blockchain will shape the next era of prosperity in finance, business, healthcare, education, governance, 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, Thinkers 50 named Don as one of the most important business thinkers in the world. A June 2013 Forbes analysis of social media identified Don as the most influential management thinker in the world. He is the author or co-author of fifteen widely read books about new technologies and new media in business and society, including Wikinomics and The Digital Economy.

Alex Tapscott is a Chartered Financial Analyst working in New York and Toronto as Vice President of Institutional Equities at the investment bank Canaccord Genuity. He is on the faculty of the Global Solutions Network Program at the Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, and is author of the book Towards the Breaking Point.