How the Blockchain will transform everything from banking to government to our identities

Father and son duo Don and Alex Tapscott have impeccable timing.

Just as their new book, “Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, And The World,” came out, ventures centered on blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, were in the news — including the DAO, the most funded crowdfunded project in history, which had raised $147 million as of press time.

But the seeds of their book were first planted back in 2013 when Alex began hearing about Silk Road. “I approached it with some level of caution, but the deeper I got the more convinced I became that this technology held the potential to be a really big deal and to transform a lot of industries,” he says.

At the time, Don was running a $4 million research project called Global Solution Networks at the University of Toronto on new ways of doing global problem solving, including Bitcoin. Since Alex, a former investment banker who now heads up blockchain advisory firm Northwest Passage Ventures, had almost a decade in financial services, he wrote the 2014 paper, “A Bitcoin Governance Network,” which in turn led to their book deal.

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