The Blockchain Revolution

We are lucky to be living in one of the most interesting times in human history... because we get to witness and experience the exciting journey from one economic system to another. The entire financial structure of the world is about to change. We're talking about blockchain technology. Digital Money. Cryptocurrencies. This is what is going to replace our current fiat money system in the near future. There's no stopping it. We're on a journey from an old economic system to an entirely new structure of monetary transaction. And we get to take part in that transformation, and we have front row seats.

Imagine you are out shopping and get to the checkout but your card doesn't work. It turns out that your bank has had a computer meltdown and none of its customers, including you, can pay for anything. But what if during checkout you had access to a record, or ledger, of the balance on your credit and debit cards that was updated anytime you bought something? Even with the bank's systems down your card would still work at the supermarket, because the retailer itself would know your balance.

That is just one possibility offered by a distributed ledger, also referred to as a blockchain. The technology has been around for more than a decade and has been heavily hyped. The blockchain acts as a universal record of every Bitcoin transaction ever made. The blockchain is a ledger, or log, of those transactions and users on the network collaborate to verify new transactions when they occur. They're rewarded financially for this effort - an enterprise known as "Bitcoin mining".

The basic idea is of a ledger of information distributed around lots of different users instead of held centrally by a bank. Blockchain is an ingeniously simple technology that powers Bitcoin. But it is much more than that, too. It is a public ledger to which everyone has access, but which no single person controls. It allows for companies and individuals to collaborate with an unprecedented degree of trust and transparency without a bank in the middle. It is cryptographically secure, but fundamentally open. And soon it will be everywhere.