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The 500 years thing is pretty tough for me. No love for the steam engine? mass production? Computers? The internet? Surely the internet has revolutionized the w

The 500 years thing is pretty tough for me. No love for the steam engine? mass production? Computers? The internet? Surely the internet has revolutionized the world more than blockchain will.

Alex3917 4y ago
> mass production? Computers? The internet? None of these would have been possible without the invention of double entry accounting, because before double entry accounting you couldn't even really run anything larger than a family business because there was no way to know whether or not you were making or losing money. So it stands to reason that because blockchain is a breakthrough in accounting of a similar magnitude, in the sense that it will enable all sorts of new economic relationships that aren't possible today by radically driving down the transaction costs of doing business, that these new relationships will similarly enable all sorts of new technologies that we can't even imagine today. To understand blockchain, you need to go back and read all the books on the history of double entry accounting in order to understand the changes that it enabled within society. But these changes aren't going to happen over night, they'll take a couple hundred years to play out, in the same way that it was a couple hundred years between the invention of double entry accounting and the height of the Dutch East India company or whatever.
- SilasX 4y ago
  >None of these would have been possible without the invention of double entry accounting, because before double entry accounting you couldn't even really run anything larger than a family business because there was no way to know whether or not you were making or losing money. What? I thought the benefit of double-entry was that it makes fraud and inconsistencies easier to catch, not detection of profit per se (which single-entry can surface).
  - Alex3917 4y ago
    > I thought the benefit of double-entry was that it make fraud and inconsistencies easier to catch, not detection of profit per se One of the key principles of double entry accounting is denominating profit and loss in a fungible currency, rather than just recording the number of goats you own or whatever. Double entry is actually the codification of several different best practices, it’s more than just having two sides of the ledger. But even with just the fraud part, you are very limited on the number of employees you can have if you don’t have any way to know if they’re stealing from you. That’s why even though e.g. Ancient Rome had thousands of fast food restaurants, they didn’t have franchises like McDonalds.
    - amscanne 4y ago
      Poppycock. Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece both had plenty of sophisticated bookkeeping and accounting methods — I don’t think you can even point to a single moment in time when double entry was “invented” (just standardized or popularized). There are many reasons that they didn’t have McDonalds-like franchises, and none of them have to do with accounting. Those kinds of franchises didn’t exist in the modern world until the 20th century; they are product of many elements of modern culture (and modern approaches to business). What the heck would a franchise even do for someone in Ancient Rome? It’s not like there are massive chicken suppliers or industrial-scale bakeries that produce standardized food products to sell. Every restaurant needs to source local suppliers directly anyways. Fast food chains make no sense without industrialization, among many other things (bookkeeping being the least of them).
      - thom 4y ago
        You could (somewhat weakly) argue that Roman publicani were a form of franchise.

The 500 years thing is pretty tough for me. No love for the steam engine? mass production? Computers? The internet? Surely the internet has revolutionized the world more than blockchain will.

Alex3917 4y ago

> mass production? Computers? The internet? None of these would have been possible without the invention of double entry accounting, because before double entry accounting you couldn't even really run anything larger than a family business because there was no way to know whether or not you were making or losing money. So it stands to reason that because blockchain is a breakthrough in accounting of a similar magnitude, in the sense that it will enable all sorts of new economic relationships that aren't possible today by radically driving down the transaction costs of doing business, that these new relationships will similarly enable all sorts of new technologies that we can't even imagine today. To understand blockchain, you need to go back and read all the books on the history of double entry accounting in order to understand the changes that it enabled within society. But these changes aren't going to happen over night, they'll take a couple hundred years to play out, in the same way that it was a couple hundred years between the invention of double entry accounting and the height of the Dutch East India company or whatever.

SilasX 4y ago
>None of these would have been possible without the invention of double entry accounting, because before double entry accounting you couldn't even really run anything larger than a family business because there was no way to know whether or not you were making or losing money. What? I thought the benefit of double-entry was that it makes fraud and inconsistencies easier to catch, not detection of profit per se (which single-entry can surface).
- Alex3917 4y ago
  > I thought the benefit of double-entry was that it make fraud and inconsistencies easier to catch, not detection of profit per se One of the key principles of double entry accounting is denominating profit and loss in a fungible currency, rather than just recording the number of goats you own or whatever. Double entry is actually the codification of several different best practices, it’s more than just having two sides of the ledger. But even with just the fraud part, you are very limited on the number of employees you can have if you don’t have any way to know if they’re stealing from you. That’s why even though e.g. Ancient Rome had thousands of fast food restaurants, they didn’t have franchises like McDonalds.
  - amscanne 4y ago
    Poppycock. Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece both had plenty of sophisticated bookkeeping and accounting methods — I don’t think you can even point to a single moment in time when double entry was “invented” (just standardized or popularized). There are many reasons that they didn’t have McDonalds-like franchises, and none of them have to do with accounting. Those kinds of franchises didn’t exist in the modern world until the 20th century; they are product of many elements of modern culture (and modern approaches to business). What the heck would a franchise even do for someone in Ancient Rome? It’s not like there are massive chicken suppliers or industrial-scale bakeries that produce standardized food products to sell. Every restaurant needs to source local suppliers directly anyways. Fast food chains make no sense without industrialization, among many other things (bookkeeping being the least of them).
    - thom 4y ago
      You could (somewhat weakly) argue that Roman publicani were a form of franchise.