>> Yeah, sorry, my passion for bitcoin, knows no bounds. >Understood, but finding gems in the rough takes time that, frankly, I >don't have.
OK, I´ll try to help sort out the gems a bit. >> I suppose I´d like to see bitcoin supported as a mainstream currency, >> despite the lack of official ISO recognition. I imagine GnuCash not only >I don't know what our policy is on adding non-ISO currencies to the list >of currencies. That would be a great start. In revision of this policy, I think it may be poignant to consider the nature of currency, as shared information about what the wider populous values. There are distinct qualitative differences, between the officially supported ISO fiat currencies and that of an online ´viral´ currency like bitcoin. Firstly, bitcoin´s value is derived by direct supply and demand of the marketplace, rather than being authorized by any government mandate that it must be used as legal tender. The most obvious problem with government fiat currencies in general, is that the extent of their value, extends only as far as the legal mandate of their issuing government authorities. In an emerging global economy, the regional nature of our governments tends to be problematic. As an Australian I have no need for American dollars. I have nothing I can spend them on locally. Moreover, there has been a noticeable vacuum in the market, for a unit of currency that transcends national boundaries. There may then be a danger of one currency becoming the predominant universal one. It would be a great pity if that currency happened to be the US dollar, simply by the pervasiveness of American culture. Itś not a race issue of course, but a re run of the old VHS vs Betamax non-compatibility issue. No one government deserves the liberty to control the global economy, just because itś currency has become a defacto standard. Another obvious qualitative difference, is that physical cash currency, can´t be sent over the internet. The ´information´ about shared value, is stored on a physical medium, with obvious physical limitations. Of course banks can transfer digital representations of any currency, but then we are at the mercy of the global banking system, as we then require a trusted intermediary to implement our transactions for us. Banks in turn, are subject to the regional law and the regulation of national governments. The existing fiat currency system, is locked into a nationalistic, centrally authorized and controlled paradigm. Without the advent of peer to peer information sharing, and then Satoshi Nackimoto´s solution to the double spending problem, we might have been forever stuck in this gridlock of a national monopolist impasse. The American system of money distribution is particularly frightening, owing to itś farming out of the money supply to private enterprise. I heartily recommend the developers of GnuCash, reconsidering their whole concept of money and the process by which the application itself might (perhaps inadvertently) play into the existing paradigm, by exclusively honoring the ISO standard of currency definition. Itś something that should give us all pause. Might I humbly recommend that anybody interested in these matters, Google ¨Money as debt¨ and ¨Money as Debt II¨ >> So, thatś a static exchange rate then is it? Iḿ under the impression that >No. It means that every transaction has a 'static' exchange rate. But >every transaction can have its own distinct exchange rate. I think that´s what I meant actually. It´s static in the sense that itś not updated in real time. So, every transaction will require a manually advised exchange rate requiring user input. That´s the crux. As I understand it, for the application to ´know´ what the current exchange rate is, it needs to be informed by manual user input. So the other side of the coin so to speak, is being able to have a live feed to a currency with a known exchange rate that can be updated automatically, in ´real time´. I don´t know how difficult that is for fiat currency, but in the bitcoin world it appears to be a cake walk. So those are the basic principals I would like to se GnuCash strive for. Thanks for your time. Regards Karmicads. -- View this message in context: http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/For-The-Love-Of-Bitcoin-tp4348895p4393061.html Sent from the GnuCash - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
