As a business reporter for 40 years now I have seen my share of booms and bust.
The Houston oil boom, and bust. The S&L boom, and bust. The dot-com boom, and bust. The real estate boom and bust of the 2000s.
All those booms and busts happened just in the U.S. Other countries had their own cycles. There was the “Asian contagion” of the 1990s, and the Euro crisis early in the current decade, to cite two examples. While Houston was booming, New York was busted. And vice versa.
But the current cycle is different. Thanks to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is an implementation of Blockchain, which is as revolutionary in its way as the Internet itself was in the 1990s. Blockchain automates trust. That means if you’re working as a financial intermediary – as a banker, a broker, a trader, or a regulator – your job could be eliminated in the next 20 years.
Blockchain does this by applying encryption to two already-existing technologies, the database and spreadsheet. Each block of data is encrypted. Each block is part of a database. The database is organized as a general ledger, a spreadsheet.
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