Excerpt from our article "We Need to Talk about Blockchain", published in the December 2019 edition of the Cutter Business Technology Journal:

Blockchain is an Internet technology that has the ability to truly transform business and society because it enables the means to explicitly state the terms of governance of collaborations, including those in which there is a huge differential in the power and resources of participants. Thus, it is conceivable that blockchain will cause a disruptive paradigm shift ... so we need to talk about blockchain.

 

Amid all the useful and wacky ideas, the fortune-making and fortune-losing cryptocurrency gambles, initial coin offerings (ICOs), security token offerings (STOs), and so forth, the advent of a set of real, effective, and deployed technical solutions for collaboration among multiple parties has taken place under the general label of “blockchain” or, sometimes, “DLT” (distributed ledger technology).

 

It is that set of solutions for potentially complicated collaborative enterprises, in which the parties do not or cannot trust each other, that so-called blockchain technology has changed everything. Let's examine how.

In this article, Philip Greenwood and Mark Woodman focus on what blockchain is, the role of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in a digital economy architecture, and a new layer of the Internet, formed of ecosystem-type architectures. They discuss how blockchain and DLT networks are changing the way complex enterprises can automate collaboration and how a new layer of the Internet will create communication, storage, and execution services among many external participants.

 

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