Views differ on bitcoin, but few doubt the transformative potential of
Blockchain technology. The Truth Machine is the best book so far on
what has happened and what may come along. It demands the attention of
anyone concerned with our economic future. --Lawrence H. Summers,
Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard,
Former Treasury Secretary
**
From Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, the authors of The Age of
Cryptocurrency*, comes the definitive work on the Internet's Next Big
Thing: The Blockchain.***
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.
