HBR Insights Future of Business Boxed Set (8 Books)

 

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF BLOCKCHAIN

by Vinay Gupta

Many of the technologies we now take for granted were quiet revolutions in their time. Just think about how much smartphones have changed the way we live and work. It used to be that when people were out of the office, they were gone, because a telephone was tied to a place, not to a person. Now we have global nomads building new businesses straight from their phones. And, think, smartphones have been around for merely a decade.

We’re now in the midst of another quiet revolution: blockchain, a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of ordered records, called “blocks.” Consider what’s happened in just the past 10 years:

• The first major blockchain innovation was bitcoin, ...