Blockchain for Dummies, reviewed

By @SimonCocking Blockchain for Dummies by Tiana Laurence reviewed, available from Wiley.

Blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoin, the revolutionary ‘virtual currency’ that is changing the way people do business. While Bitcoin has enjoyed some well-deserved hype, Blockchain may be Bitcoin’s most vital legacy. Blockchain For Dummies is the ideal starting place for business pros looking to gain a better understanding of what Blockchain is, how it can improve the integrity of their data, and how it can work to fundamentally change their business and enhance their data security.

Blockchain For Dummies covers the essential things you need to know about this exciting technology’s promise of revolutionizing financial transactions, data security, and information integrity. The book covers the technologies behind Blockchain, introduces a variety of existing Blockchain solutions, and even walks you through creating a small but working Blockchain-based application.

There is a lot of buzz and hype about blockchain at the moment. This is not to say it is not without good reason, however as the large number of over exuberant statements about it’s revolutionary potential abound, it is important to also try and cut through the hype. John Evan’s recent informative article for TechCrunch ‘Beyond the boring blockchain bubble’  helps to try and dig a little deeper into what it may or may not actually mean for us in 2017 and beyond.

This book by Tiana Laurence, CMO of Factom, could well be a very useful addition to your bookshelf to help get yourself up to speed with what blockchain really means, its potential uses, and the nuances between the different flavours out there. In some ways the subtitle of the book ‘for dummies’ is a bit of a misnomer because this book gives you a good guide from a high level overview into a deep dive into many of the leading variants out there from the mostly commonly known Bitcoin Blockchain, Ethereum, and then Ripple and Factom. It is well written with clear instructions into how to open your first bitcoin wallet, with logical security steps that you should be taking and useful tips about safe and unsafe usage of it.

We enjoyed reading it, learned several things that either we didn’t know, or ‘were ashamed to ask’, so it was a good book to read and review. One issue with a physical book like this is that things are moving along very quickly, particularly with recent developments in Ethereum and other blockchain technologies too, so it might be prudent to either read this book soon, or perhaps get the digital version too, to allow for potential updates to the text.

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