If you are still wondering why so many investors are going ga-ga over bitcoin, we suggest you read the excerpt Fortune published yesterday from a new book called The Blockchain Revolution, by Don Tapscott and his son Alex. The elder Tapscott is a prolific book writer – his works include The Digital Economy (1994) and Wikinomics (2006) – and a popularizer of technology topics. The Tapscotts’ enthusiasm for the latest tech craze may strike some as over the top, but they make the bulls’ case in clear and compelling terms.
Tapscott sees the blockchain technology that underlies bitcoin as solving one of the most fundamental problems of the Internet age – that of trust. The Internet allowed for instant exchange of information, but the exchange of value has been hampered by the absence of trust, and a need for trusted intermediaries – banks, credit card companies, PayPal, etc. – to certify value transactions. The blockchain’s distributed ledger solves that problem, and could, in the Tapscotts’ view, be the biggest boost to capitalism since double entry bookkeeping.
