Monika Fleming — article

-We need better ledger-

Since of the beginning of times bookeeping were used simply to keep track of your ownings. How many stocks You have for example. How many pair of shoes have been sold etc. Simple adding the numbers. When more complex societies arised and more barter and more complex trade occured it became necesseraly to remember who owns whom and how much. To generate wealth money always needed to be in circulation.

It’s not actually money, but the flow of your stocks/products/services in a circulation that was flowing around could generate something in return – wealth.

But without ledger that would not be possible.

Without ledger everyone would made up their own prices and setting their own system of meassurement (for gold or commodities for example) but that would means no society at all…

Agreement on a common system was the foundation of cooperation, and we as humanity were able to achieved this consensus on money.

Money is closely related and almost synonymous to the ledgers.

Only through proper way of bookeeping we could have developed that tool we called money.

You can use seashels, cows, rolex watches or paper banknotes- it doesn’t matter that much. What matters is the fact if the way of describing and record keeping reflects reality and accurate state of events.

Ledgers are very important as they show us reality.

The tool we’ve had so far was far from perfect tho.

It was easy to write down whatever you want. People didn’t trust ledgers anymore, nor the people who were creating them. Sometimes people haven’t even check them and banks wasn’t especially open about it.

For example: deposits that people wanted to held in a vaults wasn’t there, only around 10% was held, the rest of it was lent out further? Bank ledger kept information that 100% was there.

It wasn’t. Banks lent out 90% to the other banks, process repeats and extra 90% of artificial flow of money that devalued the original deposits were created

Banks could say that X amount of money is in the place A where in fact

X is in the A in 10%

but 90% of it are in the B at the same time.

It wasn’t something that reflects basic truth that the same amount of money can’t be in two places at the same time.

Not in our 3rd dimension at least.

With honest ledger that possibility would not exist.

No one would make that fancy bookeeping process legal or justify this kind of misleading bookkeeping.

Banks were giving away money that wasn’t theirs, that was trusted to be kept safely in the case of hard times.

It’s not that bankers wasn’t clear about the practice. It was possible to write different numbers on the ledgers that not reflects reality as it is. Ledger allowed that, it was too easy to not cheat the system.

Something needed to be improved.

As it happened in the past, we improved ourselves by improving our tools.

Old system based on the writing in the columns who owns what and when – even digitally – needed to evolve. The new way needed to emerge and it happened – during the banking crisis by the way- that new system were invented.

New tool, new way of keeping track, new ledger.

Bitcoin

Every transactions is written as it really happens, reflecting reality and precise actions, system that is programmed to keep data forever on the ledger and once settled on the Blockchain remains immutable, mathematically programmed to never reverse.

But Bitcoin is not only a Blockchain. For digital money that wouldn’t be enough.

That would be enough for signing contracts and as long as money are contracts between people, agreements on prices and promise of delivery what is in the contracts, Bitcoin needed something more. And that thing was security.

How to make sure that promise titled „X amount of money will be kept safely in a vault as long as I wish” will be really protected and delivered?

And more importantly – how you can make sure it’s truth?

The power of that kind of ledger is in a network. First time in history money can be propagated through network where nodes are responsible for checking them, validating them and making copy of actual reality based on a true events.

It’s not in the hand of centrally controlled entity anymore. First time in history you can too have an access to that database. Even more – by creating a node you are making Bitcoin – money based on truth – more secure for yourself and for others.

It’s not banks that are responsible for security anymore. I’m not going to give away my money to any vault in any banks digitially or remotely even if its in Switzerland.

First time in history I have this opportunnity to self-custody and I’d say its great responsobility for all of us to take care of the money.

Decentralized network and database on blockchain creates one of a kind ledger for XXI century – Bitcoin, perfect way of writing the truth.

12/09/2023

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