Melanie Swan
As bitcoin and its ilk start becoming mainstream, I think the book would serve as a good primer for those who would like to learn about the underlying technology – blockchain. It also provides a catalog of existing projects across diverse domains.
Without doing a lot of technical deep diving, it not only provides an understanding of the concepts and features of blockchain, and highlights the current uses of the technology, but also provides a broad view of the different kinds of applications that could be made possible in the near future.
Though some of them might seem to be too futuristic, I think it is possible that we might see at least some of it in our lifetime. After all, a lot of the technology we currently use might have been deemed impossible even as recently as a quarter of a century ago. I was particularly fascinated by the possible influence of blockchain in the development of AI.
While the beginnings are in the form of a currency, the potential to scale to adjacent areas like other financial domains, and then beyond that into health, identity, governance, publishing, science, organisations etc is very interesting. Definitely worth a read for those interested in how the system of the world is evolving.
