The Business Blockchain

“When we link information in the Web, we enable ourselves to discover facts, create ideas, buy and sell things, and forge new relationships at a speed and scale that was unimaginable in the analogue era.”

blockchains carry with them philosophical, cultural, and ideological underpinnings that must also be understood

Back-end database that maintains a distributed ledger, openly.

A trusted third party is not required to prevent double-spending.

The old adage “Is it in the database?” will be replaced by “Is it on the blockchain?”

Information access will not be enough. We will also want to ask for truth access, and we will ask if modifications were made to particular records, expecting the utmost transparency from those who hold them. The blockchain promises to serve up and expose transparency in its rawest forms.

new class of services that will check blockchains to confirm the veracity of information.

we will not be able to double copy or forge official certificates once they are certified on a blockchain

From the mid-1950s forward, as IT evolved, we became accustomed to a new language: mainframes, databases, networks, servers, software, operating systems, and programming languages. Since the early 1990s, the Internet ushered in another lexicon: browsing, website, Java, blogging, TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, URLs, and HTML. Today, the blockchain brings with it yet another new repertoire: consensus algorithms, smart contracts, distributed ledgers, oracles, digital wallets, and transaction blocks.

The Internet was about replacing some intermediaries. Now the blockchain is about replacing other intermediaries once again. But it's also about creating new ones