The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain EconomyThe Blockchain is the Internet of Money
John Tammy’s review of Life After GOOGLE in RealClearMarkets [1], credits Guilder as a heroic thinker. At the same time he views Life after Google a disappointment. Although billed as a book that will among other things explain the coming “blockchain” revolution, 284 pages later he was still unclear about what it is and why it excites so many. He quotes a line that techies might relish: “The peak compute rate was 5.63 teraflops, so they had four modules per machine, for a total of 225.2 teraflops, putting them on the list of the world’s top supercomputers with a near-quarter-petaflop cluster.”
Meanwhile Silicon Valley visionary Balaji Srinivasan in the WSJ explains how bitcoin works and why it is revolutionary. Srinivasan has called the stateless digital currency bitcoin “the most important technology of the decade.” When asked why, he amped up the description. “I’d update that today to say that the blockchain—which is not just bitcoin—is the most important invention since the internet.” He further stated “. . . I’m not sure if that’s consensus among Silicon Valley now, but it’s getting there.” The “blockchain,” he explained, is like the internet of money—with similar decentralizing and liberating potential.
Rich Karlgaard [2] in his innovation column at Forbes tells “Why Technology Prophet George Gilder Predicts Big Tech’s Disruption.” Over the last four decades, George Gilder has been one of the most influential writers on economic growth and prosperity, and technology’s key creative role in them. In 1981 Gilder’s book, Wealth and Poverty, hit all the bestseller lists and helped define the “supply-side,” low-tax economic revolution that characterized the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. In the late 1980s Gilder turned his attention to technology and wrote several books predicting tech’s future impact, including Microcosm (1989), Life After Television (1990), Telecosm (2000), The Silicon Eye (2006), and The Scandal of Money (2009).
[IN HIS BOOK ON “SCANDAL,” GILDER STATES THAT GOVERNMENTS HAVING FORGOTTEN WHAT MONEY IS FOR AND HOW IT WORKS. AS A RESULT, THEY’RE ISSUING MORE AND MORE OF IT, ON THE ASSUMPTION THAT SOMEHOW MONEY CONSTITUTES WEALTH, INSTEAD OF REALIZING THAT MONEY MEASURES WEALTH.]
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