Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money

by Nathaniel Popper

The essential quality of successful money, through time, was not who issued it—or even how portable or durable it was—but rather the number of people willing to use it.

In an essay entitled “Blockchain: It Really is a Big Deal,” the head of research at IBM, Arvind Krishna, wrote that blockchain technology was set to change any industry that required trust between two parties and that relied in the current world on some middleman to broker transactions, including law and international trade.