Tiana Laurence

First a quick heads up: a lot of the activities this directs you to often will incur additional costs and fees. The author does mention these things, but it's not always clear, and I don't think it CAN be clear since this is a new and changing technology within lots of new companies, including the author's clearly disclosed involvement with Factom, a company she helped found. Specifically, with Bitcoin. Though you can set up Bitcoin wallets for free, there are transactions fees incurred when actually transferring funds. As recommended by the author in the chapter on Bitcoin, I put $5.00 into an account. Upon transferring a small amount to a second wallet in blockchain.info I did incur both a network fee of $1.00 and a small transaction fee of six cents. Just be aware of this in advance. If you've never set up a Bitcoin account or wallet I do recommend going through the steps I did in Chapter 3, "Getting Your Hands on a Blockchain."

I must also note that due to the dynamic nature of the technology and referenced web sites, many of the directions have already become slightly obsolete. It's not too difficult to figure out how to do what the author is suggesting or directing, but the more specific the directions in interacting with a web site the higher the chance of some deviation in reality.

This barely scratches the surface of the real underlying technologies themselves, so if you're interested in investing, mining for cryptocurrency tokens, or interacting with API's you'll have to go elsewhere. If you're new to the idea of blockchains, this is your book.

In library land we have something called "annotated bibliographies." Basically, you get a full citation and direction to the source material, with a paragraph or paragraphs summarizing the citation. So in this book, you get something similar. As a leaping off point this is a great place to begin to pursue things in depth.

A strength of the book is the breadth of the different activities developing as of this minute. Most people won't even need to go through all of the chapters, and the author often recommends skipping certain areas if you're not interested.

As an overview of blockchains, this is excellent. It is what I would call a "broad and shallow" work, and that's obviously by design via the "for dummies" reference. But make no mistake, this book is NOT for dummies. The conceptual possibilities of blockchains slowly dawned on me as I went through this book. I actually recommend that you DO go through the sections in which you're not interested as you may find out that down the road a concept used for real estate contracts might end up being relevant in another field.

Startling concepts, good book, great leaping off point, not for dummies. Highly recommended for the eclectic nerd that would be comfortable with concepts in contracts, currency, anonymity, and security issues.

Finally, the author regularly points out the potential risks that exist in companies and players in this new industry (and I'm not sure it can even be described as a coherent industry!).

Yes, I loved this book.… (meer)