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Latest Read: The Blockchain Revolution

Blockchain as a financial technology (FitTech) surged in late 2015. Wall Street banks and other international financial firms stress tested this technology and are investing in blockchain infrastructure. Even Janet Yellen and The Federal Reserve received a blockchain briefing within June.

Don Tapscott’s Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World is a worthy introduction to this advanced security ledger technology. This book is NOT about Bitcoin.

The Blockchain RevolutionTapscott paints with a wide brush across the underlying architecture. Looking for blockchain infrastructure, cryptocurrency or blockchain as a service than take a glance at the table of contents. O’Reilly’s Blockchain books are more targeted to tech folks anyway.

Hard to believe I have been a fan of Don’s writing for over 10 years. Just looked at my review of Wikinomics and MacroWikinomics, his previous books published way back in 2006. His follow up Macrowikinomics was released in 2008. It was interesting to me to understand Don lightly wrapped an element from Wikinomics called Ideagoras into The Blockchain Revolution. Sometimes you just cannot leave home….

Clearly FinTech sees the blockchain’s potential to disrupt their world. The focus for Tapscott is how to address Blockchain beyond Wall Street. The blockchain allows participants of public and private distributed systems to agree on a common view of a system and track changes across those systems with highly secure encryption. Security is also the core of healthcare blockchains with the focus on the crypto in cryptocurrency.

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Education

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

I consider Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics essential reading.  I just read his tweet that he and Anthony Williams are releasing MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World in late 2010.

I read his previous book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything back in 2007 (review here) and I think its just outstanding….minus the role of advanced networks like Internet2 or BoreasNet especially if you live in the Midwest.

Don’t get me wrong I strongly believe Tapscott hit the nail on the head about the future of collaboration in Wikinomics, but he could not realize how important BoreasNet is for the Midwest’s economic growth and green technology futures.  With Boreas now connected to the Northern Tier its making the internet as “flat” as Friedman described in his best selling book The World is Flat: a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.

Now add a really, really fast network research layer on top of Tapscott’s Ideagoras and the New Alexandrians and you really have something coming together – especially when you consider advanced, big science.

Okay, okay, okay I understand its not sexy to talk about massive data from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) traveling the Midwest via BoreasNet to university research facilities – but just give it another couple of years and the impact will be huge.

This book cannot arrive soon enough….like yesterday.

Tags: Wikinomics, Ideagoras, New Alexandrians, Boreas, Internet2, trends