It's been a few years since Bitcoin discussion last emerged on this list. I realised that people often become very strong opinionated when it comes to the topic of bitcoin, about whether it's a currency or not.
The philosophical question doesn't interest me, the practical problem is many businesses (like some of mine) spends cryptocurrency for goods and services and receives them for payment, and there has to be a way to account for these transactions. Not wanting to annoy anyone by saying "overstating" it as a currency, how about let's add non-currency namespaces instead. Bitcoin is not the only trouble. Even without cryptocurrency, companies are transacting with tokens already. Take BarterCard dollar for example, an Australian dollar equivalent token popular among tradies which is absolutely not a cryptocurrency, $600m annual transaction value. 24,000 merchants and 50,000 cardholders. Not to mention various reward points and "***Dollar" industry tokens. Today's world is much different than 10 years ago when Bitcoin was first discussed. I'd propose two additional namespaces parallel to the current "Currency" namespace: Tokens and Commodity Tokens: this is for all types of payment tokens that are typically called "Something Dollar" where something is an industry or company name. They are typically pegged to a currency. "BarterCard Dollar" is such an example. There are community dollars that is used only in a city or a community group which can roughly fall into this category. Commodity: this includes all kinds of a commodity that can be used for payment. I'll simply propose that Tokens have an issuing company, such as Qantas Points are issued by Qantas, while Commodity does not. Bitcoin roughly falls into Commodity since they are not issued by any organisation or individual. We can maintain a commodity list in GnuCash officially and let Tokens be user-defined. This allows Bitcoin to be accounted in GnuCash without official endorsing Bitcoin as a currency. Instead, I propose GnuCash supports commodity accounts, a type of non-currency account that can be used to transact without buying/selling the commodity first. The programming work doesn't sound much to me. We can ignore the six-digit precision problem (Bitcoin typically use 8 digits past the decimal point). Is anyone interested and would such work be accepted? I'm interested in sponsoring some of the efforts. Regards Weiwu Z. _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] 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.
