The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains

"It’s the best clear, basic introduction I’ve found that doesn’t dumb things down too much. Other books say, ‘We’re going to just ignore the technology entirely; wouldn’t it be great if this would happen, or that would happen.’ I don’t think that’s very helpful. This is the best book I’ve found that doesn’t shrink from talking about the technology and getting into some of the detail, but does it in a very clear and structured way, so that someone without any kind of background can understand it. He has a financial services background. He’s based in Singapore and works for R3, which is one of the enterprise blockchain software systems. It’s a group of companies—initially it was a group of banks, but they’ve broadened out—that have a blockchain-like platform for doing distributed transactions. They’re in a different part of the blockchain world than, say, Bitcoin—but in the book, he’s writing about much more than just the part he’s involved in. Some who are gluttons for punishment (like me) get excited by its level of intellectual complexity. Others get excited for ideological reasons; for example, blockchain strikes them as a way to do money without governments, which they think is a good thing. For others, it’s because they think they’re going to get rich. Those are the three main reasons why people fall in love with this technology. I think the fact that it is so multidisciplinary is actually more of a challenge for people than what gets them into it. Almost no one brings the requisite expertise in all these different areas, so it leads to a lot of misunderstandings where people think they understand what’s going on, but only see one part of it."

"I thought I should probably include something that covers technical details. This book is very clear. It’s a good place to start for an intelligent non-technical reader and I thought I should include one book like that. It’s a couple of years old. It’s written with some useful perspective about how things have actually evolved and developed. The one I’m working on at the moment is called Will Robots Need Passports? It’s about digital identity. My obsessions are digital money and digital identity. Having just done a couple of books about digital money, I’m now writing a book about digital identity. I thought it would be an interesting angle to talk about how, despite the fact we haven’t actually fixed the identity problem for people, there’s already a much bigger problem coming in relation to things. We’re going to be connecting vastly more things to the internet than people and we don’t know what any of those are either. That’s part of it. By ‘things’ I mean that quite generically. It’s also linked to issues about artificial intelligence. At one level, there’s the trivial question of how do I give your car permission to park in my garage. That sounds very easy when futurists put it up on a PowerPoint slide and say, ‘Well one day your car will be able to negotiate its own car parking.’ That is true, but when you drop down one level of detail, there’s absolutely nothing there. How on earth do you know it’s my car? How did you know it was allowed to park there? How do you know that I gave my car permission to park in the garage? Etc., etc. But things are also going to be made vastly worse by the arrival of artificial intelligence . For instance, if I see something on Twitter, how can I know it even came from a person, let alone which person it came from? I’ve just got off a call with the Tony Blair Institute—I didn’t even know there was such a thing. They were calling me about government policy on identity. I had to break it to them gently that there isn’t one, which I think was a little disappointing to them. The point is that we’re in enough trouble as it is, because we haven’t figured out how to manage people’s identities online and we’re about to put billions more things online, as well. I thought that would be a fun idea for a book."