Название: Blockchain: The Next Everything
Автор: Stephen P. Williams
Издательство: Scribner
ISBN: 198211682X
Год: 2019
Страниц: 192
Язык: английский
Формат: epub, mobi, pdf (conv)
Размер: 10.18 MB

An experienced tech writer fully explains blockchain technology and how it will radically transform the world as we know it in this accessible, reader-friendly, illuminating guide.

What is blockchain? Why does everyone from tech experts to business moguls to philanthropists believe it is a paradigm-shifting technology, bound to revolutionize society as significantly as the internet? Indeed, why is blockchain touted as The Next Everything?

In this deft, fascinating, and easy-to-digest introduction to one of the most important innovations of recent times, Stephen P. Williams answers these questions, revealing how cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are just one example among dozens of transformative applications that this relatively new technology makes possible. He interprets the complexity into digestible anecdotes, metaphors, and straightforward descriptions for readers who don't know tech, and explains all of blockchain's most important aspects: why this so-called digital ledger is unhackable and unchangeable; how its distributed nature may transfer power from central entities like banks, government, and corporations to ordinary citizens around the world; and what its widespread use will mean for society as a whole.

Blockchain is software. It’s as simple as that. As software, blockchains are not physical objects. They exist only as strings of code on computers, phones, and other devices. You join a chain by connecting your phone, computer, or other device to it via software and the Internet. By joining, you become part of a system that might include hundreds, thousands, or even millions of connected people and machines, all of you on the same playing field, with no hierarchical control. The ephemeral nature of the chains belies how they can grant individuals unprecedented power in the marketplaces of ideas, governance, and finance. You can’t touch a blockchain, but it can touch you.

In other words, the software is a digital ledger for keeping track of any kind of data. This software is able to track the flow of goods, the movement of money, the provenance of artworks or poems, the treatment of refugees seeking asylum, and the health of the tundra, among other things. Two specific blockchains, called Ethereum and Bitcoin, are the most well known and valuable. Yet there are many blockchains, living on millions of computers.

Taking us on a dazzlingly vivid tour through the systems predicted to soon underpin economics, politics, global trade, science, art, and numerous other aspects of our everyday lives, Blockchain and the Next Everything is a truly extraordinary journey into our future.