Blockchain Is A New Model That Makes The Existing Model Obsolete

The geeks are building a new, digital substrate for the global economy

Blockchain is a very strange thing — simultaneously the most overhyped, least understood and most disruptive technology of our time

Some say it’s the biggest innovation in finance since the invention of double-entry bookkeeping during the Renaissance. That solved the problem of merchants knowing whether they could trust their own books, and allowed entrepreneurs and investors to form corporations, paving the way for modern capitalism. However, a third, trusted party was still needed to verify that the information in the books was correct. 500 years later, blockchain adds another entry to the ledger: a verifiable cryptographic receipt of any transaction, paving the way for a fairer, safer and more transparent global financial system.

Others believe it’s more like the design in the 1970s of TCP/IP, the watershed networking protocol that enabled computers to talk to one another and swap data. That protocol formed the backbone for the creation of the internet. In this view, blockchain is the next evolutionary step that allows for the exchange of value, turning these networks into…