Blockchain Babel, the crypto craze and the challenge to business, reviewed

By review of is the author of new book Blockchain Babel, by Igor Pejic, published by Kogan Page, March 2019, priced £14.99.

Dispel the seven myths that affect our understanding of something that has the potential to disrupt not only the finance industry, but the business world as a whole.

Blockchain is the technology behind bitcoin and other crypto-currencies. According to Santander, it could save financial institutions $15-20bn a year from 2022 onward. Most experts see an unprecedented potential, but many banks, payment processors and credit card companies fret that bitcoin entrepreneurs could cast a pall over their core business. Whatever the position of blockchain, many voices are shouting from different angles, creating a cacophony of confusion including tech-evangelists, anarcho-libertarians, and industry experts. But while everybody in IT and banking seems to have an opinion on the blockchain, there is little systematic research, no strategic analysis. Blockchain Babel is the ultimate guide to the most disruptive technology to have entered the finance industry in recent years.

Blockchain Babel looks at blockchain alongside innovation diffusion, competitive dynamics and management strategy. Shortlisted as one of the three best business book proposals by McKinsey and the Financial Times for the Bracken Bower Prize in 2016, this is a must-read for business leaders and aspiring leaders wanting to grasp blockchain and put it into context and understand the practical implications it may have.

This was a tough book to read and review. The title pretty much sets out the authors perspective on this whole area and the potential of its technology. Throughout the book the tone is sneery and dismissive, everything is presented as a myth or ‘a so called theory’. As he seeks to demolish every and any idea or concept that has been associated with blockchain it does leave you wondering what he is actually trying to say, and who he does agree support or believe has value. At the same time, early on in the book he, on one hands says that no one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is and then yet later refers to his Japanese nationality. In many ways this does illustrate a consistent theme throughout this book, namely one of wanting to have cake and then eat it too.

In so many aspects of the evolution of DLT / blockchain based technologies, there has been a wide amount of collaboration and cooperation. The author seems to place little value on this aspect of the evolution of the solutions developed in this area and is rather looking to create straw men all the better to then triumphantly demolish them. In what is an exciting and highly positive field, this book feels like a muddled and contradictory addition to the literature on this topic. We did reach out to the author to highlight some of the contradictions in the text but he was keener to tell us how we too had also clearly got it all wrong. Perhaps he is best left to follow his own path and perhaps at some point he may come to have a less selectively negative view of this area.

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