Michael, it seems your concern with bringing in quotes is that Bitcoin is not sufficiently liquid or available for public trading? In a former life I traded Bitcoin and I can tell you .......
NO ....... I was NOT discussing the liquidity of "bitcoin". That should have bee clear enough but apparently you were too focused on the specific status of bitcoin to recognize that I was bringing up the issue of "assets without well defined value". I was reacting to the fact that people in this discussion were using :"stocks" as an example of something that would always have a well defined "published value" (as do many commodities that are traded). I was saying "not necessarily so".
I was trying to point out that 100 shares of "General Motors" did have a publicly published value but 100 shares (representing a 1/10th interest) of "High Meadows Jerseys, LLC" would not. And in fact, that while entities like the first example represent most of the capitalization of entities of the second example make up the majority of all corporations.
The issue is how to represent? Assuming you WERE s shareholder in that family farm, what value do you have on your books for this asset? It is NOT liquid and there is no published price and shares change hands only at rare intervals so price paid last time might be far off the mark. Or to put the matter in another perspective (from the small business's point of view) how do we account for valuation of the business when one of these rare transactions takes place at a price far from "book value"? << look up "goodwill" in accounting>>
This is just as true with commodities. 10 troy ounces of gold is one sort of commodity asset and 10K board feet of red oak another. You'd be able to get quotes for the first and expect the actual price you could get to be close to that and be able to trade most any day. But with the second none of those things would be true. You might be able to find the price range of sales taking place the previous month in your area but that might cover a 100% range low to high and you'd have to find a buyer (the mill that bought the last batch sold probably is working on that and not looking for another batch at the moment).
Michael D Novack _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list gnucash-user@gnucash.org To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user If you are using Nabble or Gmane, please see https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists for more information. ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
