Is blockchain poised to forever change the way we approach computing? Or is it something that will remain associated with cryptocurrency?
Don Tapscott sees blockchain as something huge and pervasive. In a recent interview hosted and posted by McKinsey & Company, Tapscott, coauthor of Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World, suggests it will change the world — in ways never envisioned as the Internet developed.
What blockchain — a global online database or ledger — offers, he says, is a “trust protocol” that enables peer-to-peer sharing of value or information for any range of business activity. These days, such interactions require some kind of governing entity to provide that trust. Blockchain, on the other hand, represents a global database that is run by everyone but is not beholden to anyone. “Think of a giant, global spreadsheet that runs on millions and millions of computers,” Tapscott says, making it essentially, “an immutable, unhackable distributed database of digital assets.”
