This excellent report has been professionally converted for accurate flowing-text e-book format reproduction. Digital currency and blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt a whole host of industries from financial services to manufacturing, supply chain management, and to health care records, by infusing transparency and trust in traditionally closed systems. This is a new technology. The White Paper describing the first public blockchain application, Bitcoin, was published in 2009, and already there has been a billion dollars in capital investment over 1,000 firms, most of which are startup companies.

Bitcoin is the best-known digital currency and a good case study for the disruptive nature of the blockchain. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago highlighted how Bitcoin's blockchain solves two basic issues with digital currency, by controlling the creation and avoiding its duplication. Bitcoin limits an individual's ability to copy and paste new money files to double spend — we do that in the Federal Government sometimes — to double-spend digital wealth through advanced cryptographic signatures. The solution Bitcoin presents to currency may also be applied to other asset cases, including intellectual property, mortgages, and other property records. In a way, it provides a way to create singular possession online, mimicking possession in the physical world, but with a transparent and immutable ledger recording of the possession along the way. While there have been issues through the development and growth of Bitcoin, including some of the Mt. Gox issues, the technology has withstood the stress of growth to date. In the same way that the internet has transformed communications, the adoption of blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt digital asset transfers.