Introduction

Blockchain Revolution is a book about the power and potential of blockchain technology. The authors aim to interest the readers in this technology, understand this next wave of innovation, and take action to ensure its potential for prosperity and a better world is realized. I have been wanting to read about blockchain and this is my first blockchain book. I hope that it will help me to understand this technology better.

Author

Don Tapscott is a Canadian business executive, author, consultant and speaker, specializing in the the impact of technology on business and society. He is currently Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of the Blockchain Research Institute, an Adjunct Professor at INSEAD, recently a two-term Chancellor of Trent University in Ontario and Member of The Order of Canada.

Alex Tapscott is a Canadian business author and advisor. His main field is blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies. He is the Co-Founder of the Blockchain Research Institute. Don Tapscott is his father.

Contents

Blockchain Revolution has 11 chapters which are grouped into 3 parts.

Part I is Say You Want a Revolution. It has 2 chapters. The chapters are The Trust Protocol, and Bootstrapping the Future: Seven Design Principles of the Blockchain Economy.

Part II is Transformations. There are 7 chapters here. These are Reinventing Financial Services, Re-architecting the Firm: The Core and the Edges, New Business Models: Making It Rain on the Blockchain, The Ledger of Things: Animating the Physical World, Solving the Prosperity Paradox: Economic Inclusion and Entrepreneurship, Rebuilding Government and Democracy, and Freeing Culture on the Blockchain: Music to Our Ears.

Part III is Promise and Peril. It contains the last 2 chapters which are Overcoming Showstoppers: Ten Implementation Challenges, and Leadership for the Next Era.

Review

According to the authors, blockchain is the next round of the Internet. Blockchain can lead to prosperity through engagement. The greater the engagement, the greater the prosperity. Blockchain has the potential to disrupt most sectors in the world. Innovation typically comes from the edge of the firm, not from its core. Thus, we should expect some start-ups to employ this technology to give us something new, instead of the incumbents.

There are 7 design principles of a blockchain which include networked integrity, distributed power, value as incentive, security, privacy, rights preserved, and inclusion. In blockchain, the miners preserve the distribution of power which is deciding which transaction to include in each block, to mint coins, and to vote on the truth.

Most sharing economy companies currently are really service aggregators which segregate the willingness of suppliers to sell their excess capacity through a centralized platform and resell them, while collecting valuable data for further commercial exploitation. This is different from blockchain-enabled applications which could match supply with demand automatically.

Trust in business involves 4 principles of integrity: honesty, consideration, accountability, and transparency. This can be achieved through blockchain without much trouble due to its inherent design. The competitive advantage of blockchain comes from the entire system of activities, so competitors cannot produce the same benefit unless they manage to duplicate the entire system.

4 sets of challenges for executives dealing with Internet of Things are organizational misalignment, technological interoperability and analytics hurdles, heightened cybersecurity risks, and building in privacy and an incentive plan, including appropriate safeguards, from the beginning. These challenges could be overcome with blockchain.

This book is about the opportunities to use blockchains to unleash the economic potential at the bottom of the pyramid. The authors present the challenges and propose some solutions. The first rung of the ladder to global prosperity is alleviating poverty and addressing catastrophic crises. Financial inclusion is a prerequisite for economic inclusion. They think that blockchain could distribute opportunity and prosperity at the point of origin, rather than simply redistributing wealth after it has been created by traditional class structures.

Nonetheless, there is a particular danger that worries me. It is not necessarily what we do with the code but what we do not realize we are doing with it – the unintended consequences of a friction-free world. It means that when we are sharing everything in the open, bad actors may use it for sinister motive. The authors advocates governance (stewardship, collaboration, and incentives to act on common interests) rather than strict regulation (laws designed to control behavior) for blockchain. Whether governance is enough remains to be seen.

Quotes

1. Prediction is always a risky business.
2. If you give people bad incentives, they behave badly, and they behaved just as one would have expected.
3. Technology does not create prosperity, people do.
4. We are a species that survives by its ideas, not by its instincts.
5. Technology does not have agency.

Rating

Interested in Blockchain Revolution?

You may get the book from through the links below*.

Print from Kinokuniya Malaysia

Ebook from Rakuten Kobo

*Disclosure: The above links are affiliate links. Thus, I may earn a small commission when you purchase the book through the links.

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