In Blockchain We Trust
To understand why blockchain matters, look past the wild speculation at what is being built underneath, argue the authors of The Age of Cryptocurrency and its newly published follow-up, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything
By Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna
The dot-com bubble of the 1990s is popularly viewed as a period of crazy excess that ended with hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth being destroyed. What’s less often discussed is how all the cheap capital of the boom years helped fund the infrastructure upon which the most important internet innovations would be built after the bubble burst. It paid for the rollout of fiber-optic cable, R&D in 3G networks, and the buildout of giant server farms. All of this would make possible the technologies that are now the bedrock of the world’s most powerful companies: algorithmic search, social media, mobile computing, cloud services, big-data analytics, AI, and more.
We think something similar is happening behind the wild volatility and stratospheric hype of the cryptocurrency and blockchain boom. The blockchain skeptics have crowed gleefully as crypto-token prices have tumbled from last year’s dizzying highs, but…
