Beyond Bitcoin: How The Blockchain Could Disrupt Our Financial System

If you haven't been paying attention to Bitcoin because you don't understand how a digital currency might be relevant to your business, you might want to reconsider. It's unlikely that Bitcoin will replace the dollar, pound, Euro, or yen anytime soon (or ever). However, you're still going to be hearing a lot more about it. That's not because people are willing to consider it money. What's most interesting about Bitcoin actually has very little to do with money — and everything to do with its underlying technology, known as the blockchain, which could challenge our assumptions about what makes commerce secure and trustworthy. In a blog post last year, Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman dismissed Bitcoin as a fever dream for anti-government partisans. Still, he agreed that "t does indeed solve an interesting information problem — although it’s not at all clear whether solving that problem has any economic value."