Richie covers the so what of blockchain as opposed to the crowded area of the what of blockchain. Every large paradigm in the history of the human species thus far narrowed or completely closed some large gap; blockchain will narrow or completely close a large gap as well. The printing press closed the knowledge gap, the steam engine closed the power gap, and the Internet is closing the distance gap. Blockchain stands to close the exponentially expanding trust gap.
The exponentially expanding trust gap we live in today is not immediately apparent, the first half of the book covers the often ignored history of cooperation, the evolution of the need for control, the transformation of the creation and coordination of value, and the state of markets and modern commerce today decorated with fraud. In the journey the reader comes to a self-realization that a trust gap is vivid and apparent in commerce, and we have become anesthetized to a world where we carry the burden to always trust but verify almost every transaction with expensive, cumbersome and often inconveniencing intermediaries.
Today, we the human species start every company or transaction with the automatic subliminal assumption that counterparties cannot be trusted. And we do this without realizing, or at a minimum sometimes asking if it has to be this way.
In the second half of the book, Richie re-positions blockchain from what it is today; a paradigm that is looking for a problem, into a timely and much needed inevitable paradigm of distributed and immutable ledgers that would solve a problem that is exponentially expanding; the trust gap which the reader would have just awoken to. He paints a maturity journey for the evolution to trusted commerce driven by blockchain as finance, identity, reputation, inventory, market, agreement, and cooperate data sets sequentially evolve through blockchain first becoming trusted data sets, then becoming data sets that enable transparent consensus at scale, and eventually becoming candidate data sets for smart contracts to transact on autonomously.
If you are starting a company, running one, or trying to save one from its Kodak Moment, this book is a sobering reminder that every company is at risk of being disrupted by a trusted version of itself. The use cases and examples discussed are deep, introspective, and an immersion in what commerce would look like if we collectively brought the blockchain paradigm to life as the trust machine for commerce that it could be.
Blockchain, mankind's first opportunity for trusted commerce at global and sustainable scale.
