How can you write an article this long and still not even attempt to explain what the invention actually is? All I've learned is that triple entry accounting has something to do with encryption and bitcoin might have been inspired by it.
My understanding from the article is that, whereas in double-entry accounting, both sides of the transaction get a receipt, in triple-entry accounting, there's a third, public receipt (in the blockchain).
The benefit is that, whereas with double-entry accounting, when one of the receipts is tampered with in a professional way, you cannot tell anymore which receipt is the correct one. But in triple-entry accounting, the public receipt (the blockchain) serves as a tiebreaker and provides the truth that all can (or need to) agree on.
That would be my guess, but the book the article talks about came out before the first apparent work on blockchains was done in 1991. In fact, looking into this a little more, I'm pretty sure cryptocurrency people independently adopted the term "triple entry accounting", and it has nothing to do with Yuji Ijiri's ideas. Check out the abstract of a paper he wrote on it: https://www.jstor.org/stable/247368?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...
It's just a modification on standard accounting that has nothing to do with cryptography. I could be wrong, but it really seems like the author heard someone use the term "triple entry accounting", googled it, and assumed this guy Yuji Ijiri must have been way ahead of his time without finding the book to actually confirm it.
I understand the main point of this article is just how great the blockchain is, but it shouldn't be framed around a concept that the author apparently did no research on and isn't able to explain. Huge portions of this article are just flat-out wrong, for example:
"The Dawn of Triple-Entry
Most people missed Professor Ijiri’s breakthrough because it straddles two equally obscure and poorly understood fields: cryptography and accounting.
It’s rare enough to find a person who’s versed in one of those disciplines, never mind both. Without that kind of interdisciplinary understanding, it’s no surprise that his invention went over like a lead zeppelin.
There’s also the little problem that he was incredibly ahead of his time. Encryption had not yet entered the public consciousness. If you work in information technology you might remember the Clipper chip scandal, where the NSA tried to mandate a backdoor in all encryption. That was in 1993. Ijiri published his work in 1989. It passed mostly unacknowledged by the general public.
Then, in 2006/2007, a self-taught programmer likely stumbled on the system. He was working on an alternative currency, with no centralized trust. It was called Bitcoin."
Literally none of this is true, even the summary of the Clipper chip scandal. A quick skim of the Wikipedia article on the blockchain tells you that Satoshi was not inspired by an obscure accounting paper, but by previous work on blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
The idea is that, as with single to double, triple entry adds another record.
In this case it's the blockchain but it actually doesn't have to be a blockchain, that's just a method for having a publicly verifiable (and cryptographically reliable) 3rd entry.
Long story short: it's not really about bitcoin/blockchain but more how those technologies enable a really interesting and potentially game changing accounting process.
It started out good. Blockchains are of course awesome. But blockchains and all the usefulness entailed therein are independent of any one coin. Someone tomorrow could come up with a coin with more versatility and awesome baked-in features than ETH. Someone could then create a coin later than does even better, and so on.
The article starts good but then turns into FUD regarding modern currency. Decrying inflation in currency only further loses credibility to the author's argument. And then the author teases "And everyone will be wondering, why didn’t I see that coming? I wish I got in back then when everyone was missing the forest for the trees." What a disengenuous argument. This is essentially the Tulip analogy, except the author is unwittingly supporting it/
Interesting article that brought to light the usefulness of blockchains I wasn't aware of.
>But triple entry changes all that. We can issue stock and you can check your stock against the blockchain. Now you don’t need access to their books to verify that you actually have 10%. You can look at the chain, see that there were 10 million shares issued and that you have a million, so you have 10% for realz.
Would a blockchain-based company stock system prevent dilution of shares?
It will make it easier for you to figure out if there has been dilution because now there is an open ledger listing out what exactly has happened privately between two parties.
Though if we talk about anonymity of all parties involved, this turns into a mush again. People can pick and chose what is hidden in plain sight too.
This is a pretty informative article. A coworker recently gave a very basic introductory tech talk at lunch about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency fundamentals, so this article hit me at the perfect time.
For anyone perusing comments to see if a link is worth their time, I'd say the writing is pretty opinionated, but the fact nuggets are worth the digging.
Applications of triple-entry accounting on voting is something I'd never thought of, and it's actually fascinating. I don't necessarily think that concept has to be tied to computing either. You still go to the voting booth, but you get some printed out ID in return for your vote that acts as the private key. You can check the blockchain for your voting ID. There are still obvious issues, but my only point is that it doesn't necessarily need to be tied to voting on your computer.
Trust has always been a problem. While blockchain is a good way to resolve the problem of trust between two parties or making the information public and accessible, all the while ensuring information is immutable, I am not sure how it actually helps bitcoin. Sure, bitcoin will always be the first PoC of the idea but will it last remains to be seen.
That said, too much hyperbole in the article. Too long and not worth it.
Frankly, accounting is so old that it might actually be true. Also, it depends on what is meant by "trade": individuals exchange goods between themselves in a free-form setting, like as in sharing a bite off each others' meals or lending each other stuff. But in order to reliably and repeatedly exchange goods through time without any suffering through systematic losses - which is more like the problem of a shopkeeper - people are pretty much required to keep some form of running tally of their previous transactions in order to know what they've done so far and what their bottom-line is.
It's very much like saying that there would be no traveling without maps (or perhaps without navigation). At a glance, it is wrong. But it seems a fair and reasonable statement if it's interpreted as if saying that if people had no way of telling where they are or at least where they're going, then there would be no way of "traveling" from or to anywhere. There would merely be wandering.
In contrast to the other commenter, I don't think it's overstating things. In my opinion, it's understating things. Accounting was the killer app for writing things down back in the earliest historical times. Many clay tablets in Akkad are about accounting, and the earliest Phoenician records were accounts as well. The more familiar will recognize that it is the Phoenician alphabet that evolved into most of the Mediterranean world's alphabets, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic script.
So arguably, without the need for accounting, writing, would have been invented far later, and the literature that we have from ancient times would have been lost to oral tradition.
