The following is an excerpt from The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar. In it, Mougayar waxes ecstatic about the future of distributed databases. At its core, the blockchain is a technology that permanently records transactions in a way that cannot be later erased but can only be sequentially updated, in essence keeping a never-ending historical trail. This seemingly simple functional description has gargantuan implications.