Were it not for the written word, Homer’s Odyssey — and other indelible fragments of our oral history — would have been another opus lost to the winds of time. The modest process of record keeping, transforming from purely dictation to the written script, preserved so much of the past we now cherish. Millenia later, as that process evolved to cyberspace, record keeping has become as much about facilitating business operations and brokering trust between transacting parties as preserving great works of art.

Yet even today, a lot of the mechanics of brokering trust in transactions has eluded digitization. Even though we can mail a letter in an instant, it still takes days to transfer funds to someone else’s bank account. But it will not be that way much longer.

Blockchain is taking another step in the process of record keeping, brokering trust in real time and allowing transactions to occur at the same speed as a text message. Blockchain provides one tru