You postulate the abolition of in-house accounting and the centralisation of everyone's accounting into a P2P system which IMHO is patent nonsense.

"Centralisation"? I speet on eet...pttuuhh!

I advocate local "Community Partnerships" configured around what are essentially local community transaction and title registries, with local value circulating locally backed by pools of value and with credit backed by a mutual guarantee.

This works on any scale, provided the necessary trust mechanisms are built in. It's not necessary to be "large" if you are "linked-together small"

These will be, IMHO, what are to all intents and purposes, local disintermediated "Clearing Houses": with a local service provider (aka a bank, but not a bank putting capital at risk) managing the local creation of credit, and bringing local investors in land rental units etc together with investments and so on.

"Local" may then (for certain functions) choose to be be a member of "Area", may be a member of "Regional" and so on. Functions are devolved to the level best suited to carrying them out.

ie we see a "partnership of partnerships" evolving, the accounting records of which essentially constitute a "filespace". As with the Internet DNS, the only "central" requirement relates individual ID to IP address (ie "network presence").

Here I have some fairly simple but radical ideas concerning Communities as Internet "Domains" - "Dot Communities".

The fact is that fragmented "in-house" accounting is already under threat through the rise of "web accounting". I will still have my single entry - and you will still maintain your single entry, (backed up where necessary, so there is a log of changes, as with a Wiki) and when mine changes, yours changes - there can be no data entry error, although there may be disputes, and permissioning issues.

And we have not even begun to discuss Todd's point about the uselessness of accounting "snapshots" within time frames, as opposed to accounting for "flows" of value.


"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson