CHAPTER 2Enabling Technology
“Down the rabbit hole.”
—The crypto industry
Dozens, or even hundreds, of enabling technologies all centered around an ingenious technology known as blockchain are now entering the market. Despite its simplicity—a chain of blocks of data—it is complex to build and operate blockchain systems securely. Yet, it forms the basis for the entire decentralized, “code is king” model where humans can be disintermediated from transactions and even organizations (the enigmatic DAO). Blockchains are also the foundation for bitcoin and cryptocurrency, and computer tokenization is headed toward exclusively using them as well. While tokenization is and has been broadly used by computers for some time, well before blockchain's existence, there are strong links, leading us to discuss them together.
Blockchain
Blockchain is a set of protocols that, in an extraordinarily innovative and secure fashion, creates a transactional record that can be used either by humans or in remote processes. Combined with artificial intelligence, it is hard to envision a scenario where aspects of blockchain will not disrupt almost every industry sector in the short and medium term. New technologies will likely supersede blockchains. As such, they might not be significant in the long term, but, for now, they are probably one of the most important enablers of the Cognitive Revolution and the adoption of frontier technologies.
A blockchain is a form of electronic database system that, ...
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