6 Must-Read Blockchain Books Recommended to Product Managers in 2018
By: Trista Liu
Tags: Blockchain Technology, Blockchain, Bitcoin, Product Management

As the so-called “all in blockchain”, blockchain is super popular recently! This article puts together some blockchain books recommended to product managers.

The blockchain industry is developing so fast that it is said that it changes in the blink of an eye — — we’ll find that this isn’t an exaggeration when we fully understand its development in the past year.

A plethora of digital currencies, currency exchanges, blockchain-based projects, and businesses have been launched in the past year. What’s more, thousands of blockchain startups are popping up like mushrooms. We have recently talked with people in the blockchain industry, and realized that the development of blockchain projects is in full swing and people from all walks of life have begun to invest in it. The blockchain phenomenon is taking the world by storm.

Mockplus programmers are actively learning blockchain technology, but we believe learning about it should not be limited to the technical department. Product managers, in particular, should have an understanding of blockchain as well. Product manager who does not understand the technology used by his team does not make a good leader. To be an effective product manager, you must keep up with the industry.

Therefore, we believe that both programmers and product managers should learn about blockchain. It’s not enough for product managers to just use prototyping tools well such as Mockplus without having at least a basic understanding of relevant technologies. We don’t just want to provide a faster and easier prototyping tool for you, but also want to share more industry knowledge. This article puts together some blockchain books that are highly recommended for product managers. Why not take a look at them and work on your professional development?

1. Blockchain Blueprint for A New Economy

Melanie Swan is the Founder of the Institute for Blockchain Studies and a Contemporary Philosophy MA candidate at Kingston University London and Université Paris VIII. She has a traditional markets background with an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and work experience at Fidelity and JP Morgan. She has a new markets background as an ent.

Bitcoin is starting to come into its own as a digital currency, but the blockchain technology behind it could prove to be much more significant. This book takes you beyond the currency (“Blockchain 1.0”) and smart contracts (“Blockchain 2.0”) to demonstrate how the blockchain is in position to become the fifth disruptive computing paradigm after mainframes, PCs, the Internet, and mobile/social networking.

Author Melanie Swan, Founder of the Institute for Blockchain Studies, explains that the blockchain is essentially a public ledger with potential as a worldwide, decentralized record for the registration, inventory, and transfer of all assets — not just finances, but property and intangible assets such as votes, software, health data, and ideas.

Topics include:

Concepts, features, and functionality of Bitcoin and the blockchain

Using the blockchain for automated tracking of all digital endeavors

Enabling censorship?resistant organizational models

Creating a decentralized digital repository to verify identity

Possibility of cheaper, more efficient services traditionally provided by nations

Blockchain for science: making better use of the data-mining network

Personal health record storage, including access to one’s own genomic data

Open access academic publishing on the blockchain

This book is part of an ongoing O’Reilly series. Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Crypto-Currencies introduces Bitcoin and describes the technology behind Bitcoin and the blockchain. Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy considers theoretical, philosophical, and societal impact of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies.

2. The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology

The definitive pioneering blueprint covering the what, why, and how of the blockchain.

Blockchains are new technology layers that rewire the Internet and threaten to side-step older legacy constructs and centrally served businesses. At its core, a blockchain injects trust into the network, cutting off some intermediaries from serving that function and creatively disrupting how they operate. Metaphorically, blockchains are the ultimate non-stop computers. Once launched, they never go down, and offer an incredible amount of resiliency, making them dependable and attractive for running a new generation of decentralized services and software applications.

The Business Blockchain charts new territory in advancing our understanding of the blockchain by unpacking its elements like no other before. William Mougayar anticipates a future that consists of thousands, if not millions of blockchains that will enable not only frictionless value exchange, but also a new flow of value, redefining roles, relationships, power, and governance.

In this book, Mougayar makes two other strategic assertions. First, the blockchain has polymorphic characteristics; its application will result in a multiplicity of effects. Second, we shouldn’t ask ourselves what problems the blockchain solves, because that gives us a narrow view on its potential. Rather, we should imagine new opportunities, and tackle even more ambitious problems that cross organizational, regulatory and mental boundaries.

Drawing on 34 years of technology industry experience as an executive, analyst, consultant, entrepreneur, startup mentor, author, blogger, educator, thought leader, and investor, William Mougayar describes a future that is influenced by fundamental shifts brought by blockchain technology as the catalyst for change.

William Mougayar has been described as the most sophisticated blockchain business thinker. He is a blockchain industry insider whose work has already shaped and influenced the understanding of blockchain for people around the world via his generous blogging and rigorous research insights. He is a direct participant in the crypto-technology market, working alongside startups, entrepreneurs, pioneers, leaders, innovators, creators, enterprise executives, and practitioners; in addition to being an investor, advisor, and board member in some of the leading organizations in this space, such as the Ethereum Foundation, OpenBazaar, and Coin Center.

Just as the Internet created new possibilities that we didn’t foresee in its early years, the blockchain will give rise to new business models and ideas that may still be invisible.

3. Blockchain Revolution

The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the future of the world economy has arrived, and it’s not self-driving cars, solar energy, or artificial intelligence.

It’s called the blockchain.

The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second generation — powered by blockchain technology — is bringing us the Internet of value: a new, distributed platform that can help us reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better.

Blockchain is the ingeniously simple, revolutionary protocol that allows transactions to be simultaneously anonymous and secure by maintaining a tamperproof public ledger of value. Though it’s the technology that drives bitcoin and other digital currencies, the underlying framework has the potential to go far beyond these and record virtually everything of value to humankind, from birth and death certificates to insurance claims and even votes.

Why should you care? Maybe you’re a music lover who wants artists to make a living off their art. Or a consumer who wants to know where that hamburger meat really came from. Perhaps you’re an immigrant who’s sick of paying big fees to send money home to loved ones. Or an entrepreneur looking for a new platform to build a business.

And those examples are barely the tip of the iceberg. This technology is public, encrypted, and readily available for anyone to use. It’s already seeing widespread adoption in a number of areas. For example, forty-two (and counting) of the world’s biggest financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Credit Suisse, have formed a consortium to investigate the blockchain for speedier and more secure transactions.

As with major paradigm shifts that preceded it, the blockchain will create winners and losers. And while opportunities abound, the risks of disruption and dislocation must not be ignored.

Don Tapscott, the bestselling author of Wikinomics, and his son, blockchain expert Alex Tapscott, bring us a brilliantly researched, highly readable, and utterly foundational book about the future of the modern economy. Blockchain Revolution is the business leaders’ playbook for the next decade and beyond.

4. Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain

Join the technological revolution that’s taking the world of finance by storm. Mastering Bitcoin is your guide through the seemingly complex world of bitcoin, providing the knowledge you need to participate in the internet of money. Whether you’re building the next killer app, investing in a startup, or simply curious about the technology, this revised and expanded second edition provides essential detail to get you started.

Bitcoin, the first successful decentralized digital currency, is still in its early stages and yet it’s already spawned a multi-billion dollar global economy. This economy is open to anyone with the knowledge and passion to participate. Mastering Bitcoin provides the knowledge. You simply supply the passion.

The second edition includes:

A broad introduction to bitcoin — ideal for non-technical users, investors, and business executives

An explanation of the technical foundations of bitcoin and cryptographic currencies for developers, engineers, and software and systems architects

Details of the bitcoin decentralized network, peer-to-peer architecture, transaction lifecycle, and security principles

New developments such as Segregated Witness, Payment Channels, and Lightning Network

Improved explanations of keys, addresses and wallets

User stories, analogies, examples, and code snippets illustrating key technical concepts

Andreas is a passionate technologist, who is well-versed in many technical subjects. He is a serial tech-entrepreneur, having launched businesses in London, New York, and California. He has earned degrees in Computer Science and Data Communications and Distributed Systems from UCL.

With experience ranging from hardware and electronics to high level business and financial systems technology consulting and years as CTO/CIO/CSO in many companies — he combines authority and deep knowledge with an ability to make complex subjects easy to understand. More than 200 of his articles on security, cloud computing and data centers have been published in print and syndicated worldwide.

His expertise includes Bitcoin, crypto-currencies, Information Security, Cryptography, Cloud Computing, Data Centers, Linux, Open Source and robotics software development. He also has been CISSP certified for 12 years.

As a bitcoin entrepreneur, Andreas has founded three bitcoin businesses and launched several community open-source projects. He often writes articles and blog posts on bitcoin, is a permanent host on Let’s Talk Bitcoin and prolific public speaker at technology events. Andreas serves on the advisory boards of several bitcoin startups.

5. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future.

We already depend on the smartphone to navigate every aspect of our existence. We’re told that innovations — from augmented-reality interfaces and virtual assistants to autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars — will make life easier, more convenient and more productive. 3D printing promises unprecedented control over the form and distribution of matter, while the blockchain stands to revolutionize everything from the recording and exchange of value to the way we organize the mundane realities of the day to day.

And, all the while, fiendishly complex algorithms are operating quietly in the background, reshaping the economy, transforming the fundamental terms of our politics and even redefining what it means to be human.

Having successfully colonized everyday life, these radical technologies are now conditioning the choices available to us in the years to come. How do they work? What challenges do they present to us, as individuals and societies? Who benefits from their adoption? In answering these questions, Greenfield’s timely guide clarifies the scale and nature of the crisis we now confront — and offers ways to reclaim our stake in the future.

Previously a rock critic, bike messenger and psychological operations specialist in the US Army, Adam Greenfield spent over a decade working in the design and development of networked digital information technologies, as lead information architect for the Tokyo office of internet services consultancy Razorfish, Independent User-Experience Designer and Head of Design Direction for Service and User-Interface Design at Nokia headquarters in Helsinki.

Selected in 2013 as Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities centre of the London School of Economics, he has taught in the Urban Design program of the Bartlett, University College London, and in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. His books include Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Urban Computing and Its Discontents, and the bestselling Against the Smart City.

6. Block Chain Kakumei

Blockchain is the basic technology of virtual currency. As a new mechanism for recording electronic information, blockchain does not require managers, does not rely on organization trust, and cannot be tampered with. The existing Internet can’t carry out value transmission, but blockchain makes it possible and it will profoundly subvert the currency and financial world.

Blockchain has great potential, which is not only essential for IoT and sharing economy, but also extends to the administrative, judicial, and political fields. At present, the scope of its application is constantly expanding. In the future, it will surely change the development of business, economy, and society. Blockchain technology also generates new businesses such as forecasting markets and proof of authenticity, and is a treasure house of future business opportunities.

The blockchain subverts people’s common sense, and producing with its emergence, DAO (enterprise business organization for managers) will become the protagonist of the future society. This book combines the current world cases to fully decrypt the blockchain and looks forward to its future prospects.

The author Yukio Noguchi is the first person in the IT revolution in Japan and an economist who focuses on blockchain research. In 1972, he received Ph.D (Ph.D. in Economics) from Yale University. He was a professor at Hitotsubashi University, a professor at the University of Tokyo, a visiting professor at Stanford University, and a professor at the Waseda University School of Finance.

Since April 2011, he has served as a consultant for the Institute of Finance Research, Waseda University and an honorary professor at Hitotsubashi University. Research Areas: Financial Theory, Japanese Economy.

Summary

These are the 6 books on blockchain that Mockplus recommends for product managers. The Mockplus team also recommends other useful books for product managers:

12 Free UX & UI Books That Worth Your Reading for 2018

16 Design Books Every Designer Should Read in 2017

5 Books Advanced UX Designers Reluctant to Share

Best Books on How to learn UI/UX design

The Best Book List for UI/UX Designer, Product Manager, Graphic Designer & Logo Designer