Read Online Blockchain The Next Everything Stephen P Williams 9781982116828 Books

Product details Hardcover 208 pages Publisher Scribner (March 26, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 198211682X

Blockchain The Next Everything Stephen P Williams 9781982116828 Books Reviews

• Unlike any other book about blockchain, it’s filled with funny, interesting stories but still let you understand what it is. Clearly explain. Highly recommend for anyone who wants to understand this technology that we all should learn sooner than later!
• I keep hearing about “blockchain,” but whenever I try to learn about it, I can’t figure it out. Until now. This book really made me “feel” what blockchain is all about. Now I know that I can talk about it like an intelligent person, and it also gives me some tools for imagining how it might work in my own business. I highly recommend it.
• Wow! This book beautifully clarified a subject matter that I had long ago dismissed as impossible for me to understand! And- it made it clear why it's so important to understand it. Bravo!
• Wonderful book for any business minds trying to unpack the potential (and differentiation) of blockchain technologies for innovation and future offerings, Highly recommended.
• When cyrptocurrency prices shot up in 2017, a flood of books on blockchain and related topics hit the shelves. Some were good, most were rushed and flawed, some were near worthless. This book is in the last category and 18 months too late.
  
  One problem is the author does not understand, or at least never tries to explain, the technology. Of course there is room for books that explain implications of technology without discussing the underlying theory, but this book fails in that as well.
  
  The one aspect the author is clear about is that the blockchain is a ledger. There is lots of material on the history of ledgers, and discussions of how ledgers are useful. For example, one of his major blockchain use cases is land registry in Honduras. There's no doubt that a land ownership ledger is useful. That's precisely the 1858 idea of Robert Torrens, whose system spread rapidly throughout the world. But Torrens Title is not a blockchain in any sense. It's a centralized, unencrypted ledger maintained by the government. All the problems in Honduras could be solved by Torrens.
  
  Now there are reasons why a blockchain could be useful for Honduran land registry, but they are not discussed in the book. They cannot be, because the author has laid none of the groundwork. We might imagine that Hondurans distrustful of the government began their own public, decentralized, encrypted ledger--a blockchain--to record land ownership. They would need no permission, no one could stop them. If enough people used it voluntarily, buyers might start insisting on blockchain title, or at least examining the blockchain for possible title disputes. If so, sellers would have an incentive to obtain and defend blockchain title. If enough people did this for long enough, the blockchain could become the authoritative legal proof of land ownership.
  
  The benefits of the blockchain, as opposed to the simple ledger, is it requires no trusted central authority and no coercion. Once in place, it has strong protections against corruption. These are the things a blockchain book should discuss, not the benefits of a ledger.
  
  The author soon runs out of examples of useful ledgers, but instead of delving deeper into blockchain he starts discussing all kinds of things that are at best tangential. The cryptocurrency bitcoin uses a blockchain, so all digital currencies are topics for discussion, whether or not they use blockchains. Digital currencies are used to finance some distributed autonomous organizations, so those get chapters. Distributed autonomous organizations are pursuing some cool ideas--possibly visionary, possibly deluded--and those make fun topics.
  
  The result of this topic drift is the book resembles a random assortment of feature articles on ideas on blockchain, digital currency, cryptography, game theory and related field that could have been written anytime in the last decade. There's little unifying theme, and the articles themselves are pretty superficial.
  
  I recommend you either find a good book on blockchain that explains the technology and its possible applications, or a good book on implications of trustless pseudonymous value exchange for economics and society.
• In a very uniquely structured book - mostly a series of topically arranged blurbs/talking points that read like pithy blog posts, WIlliams provides a non-tech person a good overview of blockchain. However, this approach may not be conducive to a novice to this field and the often times poetic. Hyperbolic assertions make it sound like a Powerpoint from corporate meetings. Pithiness, simplified abstractions, and clear examples are what the author is attempting in this book; and it succeeds often enough to sustain a reader's patience and interest. Depth of detail is inconsistent - for example, there are references to ant colonies and swarm theory that the target audience may not be able to relate to. In the end, one gets a reader may actually get a cheery, distorted view of the technology and just some superficial examples - kudos to the author to take a different approach in introducing the topic to tech novices.
• "Blockchain The Next Everything" (2019 publication; 204 pages) is a non-fiction book by journalist (and NYT contributor) Stephen P. Williams over the new technology phenomenon called blockchain. The author himself admits to not being a scientist, but someone who, by happenstance, has become very interested in the next everything. "I soon became obsessed and dove in. This book is where I've come up for air."
  
  Thankfully the author starts from the assumption that his readers know next-to-nothing, okay maybe outright nothing (like myself), about blockchain technology, and hence need to be educated from the ground up. "Blockchain is a simple technology that, at its most basic, serves as a permanent, unhackable ledger for almost any kind of information you'd like to record. Yet it turns out this simple ledger technology makes an ideal platform for building all sorts of innovative and radically new applications." Except that, in the blockchain universe, "apps" are now called "dapps" (as in distributed apps).
  
  Wonder what this could mean for the internet as we know it? "The Internet, as we know it, becomes less important. It's the Internet of Information. The new, distributed Internet will grow out of this old Internet. Eventually, the new Internet will run off its own devices scattered in blockchains around the world." And so on. The author explains all of this is simple language that is easy to read (but not always easy to grasp for non-techies like myself). Do I believe that blockchain is indeed "the next everything"? Ask me again in 5 years! Regardless, this book makes for interesting reading, even for "tech-dummies" like myself.