
Why Everyone Missed the Most Important Invention in the Last 500 Years - matias-nomad
https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-important-invention-in-the-last-500-years-c90b0151c169
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burkaman
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.

~~~
majewsky
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.

~~~
burkaman
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...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/247368?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

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.

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opportune
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/

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IshKebab
This is such a terrible article. Massive hyperbole/clickbait. Doesn't explain
anything.

Save yourself some time: "The most important invention is 'triple
bookkeeping', AKA the blockchain."

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j_m_b
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?

~~~
thisisit
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.

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jamesroseman
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.

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abritinthebay
Well written, if superficial, article.

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.

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thisisit
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.

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nsebban
> Without accounting there’s no commerce, no trade.

That's quite a bold statement.

~~~
jhanschoo
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.

~~~
abritinthebay
The reason I believe it's overstating things is that barter is a form of
commerce and trade and was quite popular for a long, long, time.

It doesn't require any accounting.

But to get really any more advanced you DO need accounting in some form.

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agumonkey
"serious" groups (banks, states) are indeed looking into this right now. It
seems the only way to channel the high freq economy of the future.

