•May 23, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

This column is more musing than analysis: We don’t know where we are going, and we are going there faster and faster.

That is, we need to focus more effort on understanding the consequences of the dizzying cavalcade of new technologies that are disrupting our lives. The following brought the topic to mind.

“What the devil is blockchain technology?” editor Jonathan Whitney thundered in a recent email. For 50 years, Jon has edited, published and taken out the trash at the Carroll County Review in Thomson, Illinois. A former president of the Illinois Press Association, Jon is the consummate community journalist.

Jon had just received a press release about a new state report on the topic of his question. It sounded to him like a cockamamie, probably taxpayer-costly boondoggle. Always eager to please a paying editor, I said I’d look into it.

Blockchain is a distributed ledger (think spreadsheet) technology that provides identical information to every block on a chain. Seemingly infinite computer power and storage make it possible.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.