Ryan Philippa - Blockchain: transforming your business and our world

Blockchain

The internet was envisaged as a decentralised global network, but in the past 25 years it has come to be controlled by a few, very powerful, centralised companies. Blockchain is a technological paradigm shift that allows secure, reliable, and direct information transfer across individuals, organisations, and things, so that we can manage, verify, and control the use of our own data.

Blockchain also offers a new opportunity for humanity to fix some major problems. It can authenticate data, manage its analysis, and automate its use. With better data comes better decision-making. In this way, Blockchain can contribute to solving climate change, reduce voting fraud, fix our identity systems, improve fair trade, and give the poor an opportunity to improve their lives by monetising their (digital) capital. A world built upon peer-to-peer transactions and smart contracts can empower individuals and communities.

This book offers a fresh perspective with which to consider this transformative technology. It describes how Blockchain can optimise the processes that run our society. It provides practical solutions to global problems and offers a roadmap to incorporate Blockchain in your business. It offers a blueprint for a better world. Filled with easy-to-understand examples, this book shows how Blockchain can take over where the internet has fallen short.

Mark van Rijmenam is Founder and CEO of Datafloq and Imagjn, author and speaker, The Netherlands.

Philippa Ryan is a Barrister and Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

The authors tackle a timely and important new technology in an accessible and engaging way. This is a book that will reward you for the time you spend reading it, and we are already looking forward to reading it a second time. It is a worthy addition to the emerging collection of informative and helpful books on the world of blockchain.

Simon Cocking, Editor in Chief, Irish Tech News & CryptocoinNews

The digital revolutions first era failed to solve pressing social, economic and environmental challenges. Blockchain offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get it right. Blockchain skillfully champions the opportunities offered by a new internet of value.

Don Tapscott, Executive Chairman, Blockchain Research Institute and Co-author of Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World

So much more than JABB (Just Another Blockchain Book). Van Rijmenam and Ryan take you on a tour of the worlds potential with the blockchain trust protocol and its ability to change our world. When youre done reading this book, youll be sketching the art of the possible not dreaming about it.

Trust is a competitive advantage. You earn it in droplets and lose it in buckets. Van Rijmenam and Ryan turn the typical boring blockchain book upside and create a journey on how trust can change our world. More so, the book makes you dream big not just about the changes that are coming, but ones that you can participate in or imagine on your own. Never really had a Must Read 2018 Books list until now.

Blockchain will do for trust what the internet did for search. In a world of good and bad actors, where trust becomes a differentiator, Van Rijmenam and Ryan expand the blockchain aperture from the ubiquitous (and overwritten) cryptocurrency discussion, to a discussion how trust can change the world: business, social, equality, and more.

Paul Zikopoulos, IBM, VP Cognitive Systems, Big Data speaker and author

This is a fine and important read, especially the Blockchain history. I thoroughly recommend you read, ponder and absorb for your token strategy planning.

Thomas Power, Board Member, 9Spokes PLC New Zealand

Blockchains potential is so much more than digital currency. Blockchain: Transforming Your Business and Our World is a step towards bringing that potential to life, exploring positive use cases and practical solutions to a diverse range of global social issues, from climate change and healthcare access to digital identity and poverty. For anyone interested in how we can build a better world with blockchain technology, this book provides an educational snapshot into what a more decentralized future could look like.

Vinny Lingham, CEO and Co-Founder of Civic Technologies, Inc.

Blockchain

Transforming Your Business and
Our World

Mark van Rijmenam and
Philippa Ryan

First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2019 Mark van Rijmenam and Philippa Ryan

The right of Mark van Rijmenam and Philippa Ryan to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Van Rijmenam, Mark, author. | Ryan, Philippa, author.

Title: Blockchain : transforming your business and our world / Mark van Rijmenam & Dr Philippa Ryan.

Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018015347| ISBN 9781138313224 (hbk) | ISBN 9781138313248 (pbk) | ISBN 9780429457715 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Blockchains (Databases)

Classification: LCC QA76.9.D32 V35 2019 | DDC 005.74dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015347

ISBN: 978-1-138-31322-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-31324-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-45771-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

A major cause of poverty and conflict is the failure to transform resources into capital without predation by intermediaries (e.g. government corruption, corporate mischief) in that process. As an economist and entrepreneur, I am passionate about Blockchains potential to plug such structural leakages.

In September 2015, more than 150 world leaders gathered at the United Nations headquarters in New York for the Sustainable Development Summit. That event was the launch pad for action by the international community and national governments to promote shared prosperity and well-being for all. The UN wants to end poverty by 2030. The question is how .

I first heard about Blockchain: Transforming Your Business and Our World during the Third Global Blockchain Summit held in Shanghai in September 2017. After delivering my keynote, I attended a lunch hosted by one of its sponsors. Seated next to me was one of the co-authors of this ambitious and inspirational book. We talked about ways that blockchain-based business solutions and philanthropy could address some of the worlds Wicked Problems, as the authors call them. It is in this spirit that Van Rijmenam and Ryan have approached their book. Focusing on five of the UNs 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the authors suggest practical and commercially applicable blockchain-based solutions.