Must read books to understand Blockchain impact on Insurance:

Forecasting the impact of new technologies is difficult to predict, but it’s important for our readers to understand that certain technologies have significance.  We believe Blockchain has the significance to impact the industry, in both positive and negative ways (depending on your viewpoint).  Hence the need to put together a list of must read books to understand Blockchain’s impact on Insurance, Reinsurance, and the industry at large.


These are a few books on my bookshelf and recommended from Blockchain “experts” to help insurance professionals and consumers understand the technology and make your own forecasts about what will happen to the insurance industry.

As an insurance professional, no matter where you sit in the value chain this will be important to you.

Book list

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

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.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

From one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the twelve technological imperatives that will shape the next thirty years and transform our lives

Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives—from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture—can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly both describes these deep trends—interacting, cognifying, flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning—and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another. These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. By understanding and embracing them, says Kelly, it will be easier for us to remain on top of the coming wave of changes and to arrange our day-to-day relationships with technology in ways that bring forth maximum benefits. Kelly’s bright, hopeful book will be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where their business, industry, or life is heading—what to invent, where to work, in what to invest, how to better reach customers, and what to begin to put into place—as this new world emerges.

Blockchain: The Database Revolution That Will Change The World! (Volume 1)

Blockchain: The Database Revolution That Will Change The World! (Volume 1)

This book covers the following topics:

  • A complete breakdown of what blockchain is an how it is used to create smart contracts
  • The differences between smart contracts and traditional contracts and how they can work together
  • What blockchain has to do with crypto currencies like bitcoin and Ethereum
  • The difference between centralized databases and blockchain databases including when you will want to stick with the status quo
  • The easiest ways to determine if a blockchain database will help your company or simply cost it money
  • A comprehensive list of tools to make creating your own smart contracts, and even blockchains, as painless as possible
  • Common mistakes that prevent users from implementing blockchain successfully
  • Easy ways to test your smart contracts and even interact with them via your smart phone

Blockchain For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

Blockchain For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

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.

Blockchain Blueprint: Guide to Everything You Need to Know About Blockchain Technology and How it is Creating a Revolution


Blockchain Blueprint: Guide to Everything You Need to Know About Blockchain Technology and How it is Creating a Revolution

Blockchain is the future of our world. This revolutionary concept has been developed alongside bitcoin, but as you will learn in this book, the two have almost nothing else to do with each other. At one time, the idea of self-driving cars, fridges that could order and purchase food, and a thorough and efficient health care system were only dreams. But as a result of blockchain, however, it is now much closer than people realize to being our reality.

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

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

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.

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. Following an engaging Foreword by Vitalik Buterin, this book is organized along these 7 chapters:

1. What is the Blockchain?

2. How Blockchain Trust Infiltrates

3. Obstacles, Challenges & Mental Blocks

4. Blockchain in Financial Services

5. Lighthouse Industries & New Intermediaries

6. Implementing Blockchain Technology

7. Decentralization as the Way Forward

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

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.

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything

In The Truth Machine, Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna demystify the blockchain and explain why it can restore personal control over our data, assets, and identities; grant billions of excluded people access to the global economy; and shift the balance of power to revive society’s faith in itself. They reveal the disruption it promises for industries including finance, tech, legal, and shipping.

Casey and Vigna expose the challenge of replacing trusted (and not-so-trusted) institutions on which we’ve relied for centuries with a radical model that bypasses them. The Truth Machinereveals the empowerment possible when self-interested middlemen give way to the transparency of the blockchain, while highlighting the job losses, assertion of special interests, and threat to social cohesion that will accompany this shift.

The Power of Blockchain for Healthcare: How Blockchain Will Ignite The Future of Healthcare

The Power of Blockchain for Healthcare: How Blockchain Will Ignite The Future of Healthcare

In The Power of Blockchain for Healthcare, author Peter B. Nichol highlights where blockchain is emerging with the potential to transform the patient experience–from payers to providers to patients–embracing blockchain to create sustainable competitive advantages. Nichol magnifies the principles and use cases pioneering a new frontier to revolutionize the healthcare experience.

Based on his articles, blogs, and musings, the book shows what is required to transform healthcare from the inside. It explains practical uses for blockchain in a straightforward conversation by answering: What can blockchain do? How will it impact our health? Why should you care as a business leader?

Questions:

How can companies prepare?

Are all insurance products suitable for this technology?

Who will be first adopters?

How can companies utilize this technology?

But what are the downside?

Comment below with additional recommendations or questions

About the author

Arnold Smith

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