Don Tapscott's Blog, page 9
June 16, 2016
Leading a Revolution in Blockchain
When Don and Alex Tapscott began writing “Blockchain Revolution”, not a single bank was investing in the revolutionary technology. Now virtually every company in the financial services industry is investing heavily as they realize this new technology is the second generation of the internet – the “internet of value”. In this exciting episode of AQ’s Blog & Grill, we are honored to have Don and Alex on to discuss their new book and the implications and opportunities in blockchains.
Read the full article on AQ’s Blog & Grill.
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June 6, 2016
How The Blockchain Will Transform Everything From Banking To Government To Our Identities
Father and son duo Don and Alex Tapscott have impeccable timing.
Just as their new book, “Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, And The World,” came out, ventures centered on blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, were in the news — including the DAO, the most funded crowdfunded project in history, which had raised $147 million as of press time.
But the seeds of their book were first planted back in 2013 when Alex began hearing about Silk Road. “I approached it with some level of caution, but the deeper I got the more convinced I became that this technology held the potential to be a really big deal and to transform a lot of industries,” he says.
June 5, 2016
Blockchain is a disruption we simply have to embrace
The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the financial services industry and the world of business has arrived. Not peer-to-peer lending, artificial intelligence, big data, robo-advisers or Apple Pay – I’m talking about the blockchain, the technology behind digital currencies such as bitcoin. Blockchain represents nothing less than the second generation of the Internet, and it holds the potential to profoundly transform the financial services industry.
Because the first generation of the Internet was built for moving and storing information, not value, it has done little to change how we do business or access financial services. When you send someone information, you’re really sending a copy, not the original. It’s okay to have a printing press for information – but not for money.
June 4, 2016
Bitcoin Is Just The Beginning
One of the great mysteries of modern life is the time it still takes for a check to clear. Every other financial transaction is being reduced to the tap of a phone or the press of a key. But checks take days to rumble their way from payee to the originating bank, days of lost interest and presumably fees for the intermediaries passing them around behind the scenes. Transactions and data management are supposed to be slicker these days, and yet time and again all of us run into situations where it’s as though technology never happened, or stopped around 1993.
Now come blockchains, and according to father and son authors Don and Alex Tapscott, we should all be cheering. Blockchains are basically a much better way of managing information. They are distributed ledgers, run on multiple computers all over the world, for recording transactions in a way that is fast, limitless, secure and transparent. There is no central database overseen by a single institution responsible for auditing and recording what goes on. If you and I were to engage in a transaction, it would be executed, settled and recorded on the blockchain and evident for all to see, yet encrypted so as to be villain-proof. “The new platform enables a reconciliation of digital records regarding just about everything in real time,” write the Tapscotts. No more waiting for that check to clear. It would all be done and recorded for eternity before you know it.
June 3, 2016
Editor’s Choice: Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
Nearly a decade ago, Don Tapscott (along with Anthony D. Williams) gave us the definitive book on the myriad ways in which mass collaboration is being made possible by new technology and the Internet. That book, Wikinomics, still has a lot to teach businesses and individuals about the potential of wikis to bring together communities large and small, near or far, to work together and accomplish great things. But there is now a new technology frontier, and Tapscott is once again out exploring it.
Don Tapscott, along with his son Alex, have now turned in the first (and, being so definitive, perhaps the last—barring their own updated editions) must-read book on a new revolution—blockchains. The most well known blockchain is Bitcoin, but this is not a book about Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. It is about “the underlying technological platform” that they are built on. Because, though Bitcoin had a shadowy beginning and has been used in some of the darker aspects of the Internet, the technology it uses is built for one overriding reason—trust. And that is where its true potential lays.
June 2, 2016
How the blockchain revolution could transform our world
Don and Alex Tapscott were interviewed about their book Blockchain Revolution on Yahoo Finance.
June 1, 2016
Features From the Most Popular Altcoins Are Planned for Bitcoin
For many people involved with Bitcoin, altcoins are nothing more than testnets. Hundreds of digital currencies are currently listed on CoinCap.io, but Bitcoin still dominates 78 percent of the market. In total, there are only 10 digital currencies with a current market cap of $10 million or more.
When looking at the most popular altcoins, it’s easy to see that there are some cryptocurrency features that are more desirable than others. Many have said that any altcoin with useful features will eventually see those features incorporated into Bitcoin. Up to this point, it’s clear that many of the most popular altcoins contain features that are similar to new improvements that are planned for Bitcoin.
May 31, 2016
Can you tell a fictional “thinkfluencer” from a real one?
Don Tapscott is the inaugural fellow at the Martin Prosperity Institute in Toronto and one of the world’s “leading business thinkers,” according to Thinkers50, the “definitive list of management thinkers globally.” His 16th book, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business and the World, was published on May 7.
@ProfJeffJarviss is the self-described “hyperglocal thinkfluencer and the cofounder the Mogadishu//ReinvENT unconference.” @ProfJeffJarviss also happens to be a popular Twitter parody account and occasional blogger who deftly skewers the pomposity of tech executives, thought leaders and just about anyone who’s given a TED Talk. Sample Tweet: “Serious question: why does Lesotho have a seat at the UN, when Coca-Cola doesn’t?”
Tapscott and the Twitter account have a few things in common, though—mainly an unflagging belief that technology will improve our lives, and a penchant for sweeping statements and buzzwords. @ProfJeffJarviss even took note of a recent series of Toronto Star articles guest-edited by Tapscott.
May 30, 2016
What you need to know about blockchain technology
Alex who, along with his father, Don Tapscott, is the author of the upcoming book Blockchain Revolution, explains how the technology can change lives.
Q: Blockchain seems to have come out of nowhere to become a hot topic in technology and finance but few people seem to truly understand it. What is blockchain?
A: We have spent two years researching this technology and have concluded, unequivocally, that blockchain technology is the second generation of the digital revolution. The first generation brought us the Internet of Information. The second generation – powered by blockchain – is bringing us the Internet of Value. So what is it? Blockchain is the ingeniously simple, revolutionary protocol that allows transactions to be simultaneously anonymous and secure, peer-to-peer, instant and frictionless. It does this by distributing trust from powerful intermediaries to a large global network, which through mass collaboration, clever code and cryptography, enables a tamper-proof public ledger of every transaction that’s ever happened on the network.
And while it’s the technology that drives Bitcoin and other digital currencies, the underlying framework has the potential to go far beyond these and record virtually everything of value to humankind, from birth and death certificates to insurance claims and even votes.
In short, it’s a new medium for value.
Bitcoin May Not Survive, But The Technology Behind It Will Live On
Greg Satell writes on Forbes:
In an article I wrote two years ago about the future of money, I explained that despite the libertarian fantasies that were being bandied about at the time, Bitcoin was unlikely to ever be a mainstream currency. News in January suggested that Bitcoin may be collapsing and key figures in the community may be backing away from it.
The reasons for Bitcoin’s troubles are many, including poor governance, a lack of technological infrastructure and infighting within its community. Besides, as I noted in my previous article, the fact that sovereign governments have the power to tax in their own currencies always made a Bitcoin takeover unlikely.
Still, as Don and Alex Tapscott explain in their new book, The Blockchain Revolution, the technology behind Bitcoin may indeed be revolutionary. In fact, despite Bitcoin’s challenges there are already thousands of entrepreneurs and investors betting on blockchain technology to reimagine transactions of all types. It’s still early days, but the potential is undeniable.
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