On Jul 24, 2014, at 10:57 AM, Martin Blais <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 8:57 PM, Markus Teufelberger > <[email protected]> wrote: > This poses a few interesting opportunities but also potential issues: > Bitcoin for example has until now close to 43 million transactions recorded > [https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-total] (and some of them are > not easily decoded or meaningful, so it can be a bit of a hassle to account > for them correctly, but that's besides the point). If there were a way to > encode this dataset into ledger (e.g. transactions between > "Bitcoin:1abcdaddress" accounts) and then referencing the > transactions/addresses in your actual private ledger, this could be of use > for additional validation of transactions you enter, something like having > the entire transaction database of your bank so you can finally make > sense/use of that transaction ID. > > Given the scale and the need for constant update, this clearly requires a > custom system. > Not a good idea to use command-line accounting for this purpose IMO. > (But maybe I don't understand what you're trying to do.)
The way I see it, this additional record (which is not really another entry as there is no amount) is purely intended for verification purposes, both for ensuring correctness of ledger entries, and for verifying no entries have been missed. Here are the two use cases I can see: - audit ledger entries for correctness: iterating over entries in the ledger, verify each has a matching entry in the block chain with the correct value for credit, debit, amount and timestamp. This gives extreme confidence the account record has no incorrect entries. - audit ledger entries for completeness: iterating over each of the accounts, then iterating over each entry in the block chain for the current account, verify there is a ledger entry with the correct value for credit, debit, amount and timestamp. This gives extreme confidence the account record has no absent entries. When I was running a mining pool, each block we earned was composed of a few thousand of debits to our users for the single block credit. Sometimes those had a transaction record because the user requested immediate transfer of earned credit, but usually we held many satoshi in trust for our users to avoid transaction fees. So while it's a nice a idea, there are definitely situations where bitcoin isn't going to give you everything you desire. You could use ripplepay for those micro-transactions, but even if your transaction partners publish their transaction record publicly, there is no guarantee you can perform the completeness check (second use case) from above. -- ~j -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
