Big Data, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency are three hot topics of the modern world—disrupting, creating opportunities and challenging business models and operations of all industries across the globe. Since its inception, the emergence of Big Data has created numerous opportunities and challenges, which resulted in those embracing the same forging ahead of the competition by converting data into a source of value. The technological advancements which followed led to the creation of Blockchain technology and Cryptocurrencies, and these together are heavily disrupting the financial services. In the meantime, Blockchain technology itself is being studied as a potential source for enabling more sustainable and transparent business operations. As such, the gist of this book is dedicated to the benefits, opportunities, and challenges made possible via the fusion of Big Data, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency. However, in the introduction which follows, we set the scene and introduce the reader to a concise history of these three phenomena individually and further elaborate on the importance and need for fusing the same.

The past few years have seen the emergence of several game-changing revolutions. Big Data, Blockchain technology, and Cryptocurrency can be identified as three of the main revolutions. The information explosion, technological advancements, and data science developments continuously aggravate the urgent need in understanding, mastering, and creating economic value from “Big Data”—a term coined by Roger Mougalas from O’Reilly Media in 2005. Since then, Big Data has proven its potential to act as a guiding light for the benefits and dangers that lie ahead, and its analysis can lead to significant changes and improved understanding of how we think, work, and live (Viktor and Kenneth 2013). It is noteworthy that Big Data’s tremendous impacts on the economy, society, health, education, and sciences are so vast and extensive that no book or research project alone could capture all of the underlying information. As expected during its disruptive emergence, the evolution of Big Data has ensured disruption in all industries across the globe whilst creating numerous opportunities (and challenges) (Hassani and Silva 2015), and a demand for advancements in technology, skills, and business practices (see, for example, Hassani et al. 2016, 2019; Silva et al. 2019). As Dr Hossein Hassani asserts, life and (Big) Data have common properties as the art of life is to continue adding one more friend to its friends list every day, instead of adding one more enemy to it. As Big Data expands at an exponential rate, so should life and friendships. Since its inception, Big Data has been widely embraced by academics, researchers, practitioners, and the industry alike. As a result, it led to the acceptance of Big Data as a phenomenon that is here to stay, and the understanding that Big Data will only get bigger over time.

On the contrary, the launch of Bitcoin (Nakamoto 2008) came after the emergence of Big Data. Even though Blockchain is the technology that enables the functioning of Bitcoin, one cannot discuss the roots of Blockchain technology without discussing Bitcoin first (Marr 2018). Bitcoin had an interesting inception, in contrast to Big Data. This is because many were sceptical about the most popular Cryptocurrency to date, concerned by its nature, use, roots, and creator. Nevertheless, early adopters of this Cryptocurrency profited immensely, leading to several by-products, as introduced and discussed later on. Interestingly, it was only around 2014 that the masses realized that Blockchain technology has far more uses beyond Cryptocurrency (Marr 2018). Since then, this technological innovation has received more prominence with Marr (2018) noting that 15% (possibly more by the time we publish this book) of financial institutions are currently adopting Blockchain technology. There is no doubt that its wide adoption will not only create new opportunities but also threaten existing business models (Hassani et al. 2018a), given the many benefits it brings to the table in a world where the importance of security, trust, and risk management is at an all-time high.

The wealth of publications in the form of books and journal articles in the market and the historical Google trends for these key terms (Fig. 1.1) clearly evidence that not only researchers and practitioners across varied fields, but also the general public has showcased high interest in these technological advancements. In fact, evidence from global online search trends in Fig. 1.1 indicates that the growing interest in the topics of Big Data, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency over the past decade has resulted in transforming them into top trending searches between 2017 and 2018, as the index reached its peak. Interestingly, the timing of the peak in search interest coincides with the rapid boost seen within the iconic Cryptocurrency—Bitcoin, whereby it recorded its maximum value at almost 19,000 US dollars. Although the peak moments have passed due to the unfolding of alternative, closely related technological terms, the revolutionary circumstances they have created and the practical influences with expanding use cases have left behind three topics that remain understudied.

Historically, many authors have engaged with the topics of Big Data, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency in isolation (and rightly so, given the understanding we as humans had on these subjects back in the day). However, there has been no attempt at delving into the opportunities waiting to be exploited when Big Data, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency are combined and considered as a form of ‘fusion ’ (see Fig. 1.2). In its most basic form, fusion is defined by Google as “the process or result of joining two or more things together to form a single entity”. We find no reason to complicate this terminology further as this definition perfectly replicates what we propose through the ideas presented in this book.

The vision and direction for this book were a result of the preliminary research by Hassani et al. (2018b) in which the authors presented a concise review of the concepts of interest with the main focus on identifying the interactions among Big Data, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency. Whilst the work of Hassani et al. (2018b) was presented in the form of a review, the underlying research enabled the authors to identify a gap in the market, which was worthwhile exploring, exploiting, and researching in-depth. Therefore, in contrast, and instead of seeking to replicate previous efforts at understanding these three concepts in isolation, the present book goes a step further and aims to investigate how the digital economy could thrive under the fusion of Big Data, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency.

Accordingly, we present the sweeping opportunities, challenges, applications, and our predictions for the future of each of the three elements under the rapid FinTech revolution, and consider the technological advancements underlying intelligent decision making in the modern digital economy. These lead us to the main and unique contribution of this book: the investigation into the opportunities, challenges, possibilities, and trends arising through the fusion of Big Data, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency. We find that the interlinks and inter-dependencies which we identify among these three concepts could result in numerous lucrative possibilities for the future digital economy. We hope the proposals herewith wou...