This is an excerpt from the upcoming book The Internet of Women: Accelerating Culture Change which profiles women from over 30 countries. Rahilla Zafar, Director of Strategic Research at ConsenSys, co-authored this piece with Meltem Demirors, who is a Director at Digital Currency Group (DCG), a company that builds and supports bitcoin and blockchain companies. DCG has invested in BitPesa, BitNation, and BitOasis, all highlighted in this piece. Ameen Soleimani and Martin Lundfall are co-authors as well and both Software Engineers at ConsenSys.



One of the most exciting innovations in recent history has been the emergence of distributed computing systems, and in particular, digital currencies and the underlying technology known as the blockchain. Since it launched in 2009, Bitcoin, the first and most prominent blockchain-based digital currency, has demonstrated the viability of using the blockchain—a globally shared transaction history along with a set of rules that allows for anyone to add new, valid transactions—in order to manage asset transfers in a secure and transparent way. Originally, the Bitcoin blockchain was only used to track bitcoin transactions, but entrepreneurs have begun to use blockchain technology for other assets like money, stock bonds, loyalty points, music files, a deed, a license, or anything that has value. Anytime an asset changes hands—whether it be a financial asset or a digital asset—that change in ownership is recorded on the blockchain, and witnessed by each computer or node in the network. The striking feature of this process is the way in which participating parties come to agree on the current state of the network. Whereas transactions in the traditional financial world always need to be facilitated by an intermediate institution like a bank, blockchains enable their participants to self-govern, making it expensive for any singular entity to control the network. The blockchain is extremely difficult to corrupt or censor; tampering with historical records (perhaps to falsely claim ownership over an asset) requires computational resources greater than the combined resources of the rest of the network, which for Bitcoin at the time of this writing would cost roughly $150M.

