Why Everyone Missed the Most Important Invention in the Last 500 Years
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
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.
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.
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/
Save yourself some time: "The most important invention is 'triple bookkeeping', AKA the blockchain."
>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?
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.
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.
It underscores what a lot of bitcoin skeptics (like myself) have said for years: it's the tech that's interesting, not the "currency".
This is a good summary of why.
That said, too much hyperbole in the article. Too long and not worth it.
That's quite a bold statement.
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.
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.
It doesn't require any accounting.
But to get really any more advanced you DO need accounting in some form.