Big banks have grown bigger and more entrenched. Privacy exists only until the next hack. Credit card fraud is a fact of life. Many of the "legacy systems" once designed to make our lives easier and our economy more efficient are no longer up to the task. Yet there is a way past all this-a new kind of operating system with the potential to revolutionize vast swaths of our economy: the blockchain.
In The Truth Machine, Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna demystify the blockchain and explain why it can restore personal control over our data, assets, and identities; grant billions of excluded people access to the global economy; and shift the balance of power to revive society's faith in itself. They reveal the disruption it promises for industries including finance, tech, legal, and shipping.
Casey and Vigna expose the challenge of replacing trusted (and not-so-trusted) institutions on which we've relied for centuries with a radical model that bypasses them. The Truth Machine reveals the empowerment possible when self-interested middlemen, give way to the transparency of the blockchain, while highlighting the job losses, assertion of special interests, and threat to social cohesion that will accompany this shift. With the same balanced perspective, they brought to The Age of Cryptocurrency, Casey and Vigna, show why we all must care about the path that blockchain technology takes-moving humanity forward, not backward.
"[A] subtle, and useful, investigation of what blockchain is, and what we might reasonably expect it to accomplish...Even more than AI, blockchain is something most executives know they should care about, but haven't yet really figured out how to use. Casey and Vigna's book would be a good place to start."
Strategy + Business
"An in-depth, fair, and engaging account of a massive technological shift that affects everyone."
Business Insider
"References to bitcoin (the currency) and blockchain (the accounting ledger) are increasing at warp speed, and many of us are struggling to keep up. This book serves as a guide to this new economic order, designed to create a safer and fairer system for global transactions in part by cutting out the middleman (banks and government, for starters)."
