Why Everyone Missed the Most Important Invention in the Last 500 Years
You’ve never heard of Yuji Ijiri. But back in 1989 he created something incredible.
It’s more revolutionary than the cotton gin, the steam engine, the PC and the smart phone combined.
When people look back hundreds of years from now, only the printing press and the Internet will have it beat for sheer mind-boggling impact on society. Both the net and the printing press enabled the democratization of information and single-handedly uplifted the collective knowledge of people all over the world.
So what am I talking about? What did Ijiri create that’s so amazing?
Triple-entry accounting...
So why is it so important if nobody knows about it?
Because the first application for it didn’t come along until 2008 and so it’s real impact is still to come. But make no mistake, it’s coming like a tsunami that will remake every aspect of our lives and societies...
Most people missed Professor Ijiri’s breakthrough because it straddles two equally obscure and poorly understood fields: cryptography and accounting...
Ijiri published his work in 1989. It passed mostly unacknowledged by the general public...
Then, in 2006/2007, a self-taught programmer likely stumbled on one or both of the systems. He was working on an alternative currency, with no centralized trust.
It was called Bitcoin.
It was the first working example of triple-entry accounting...
Triple-entry accounting and by extension blockchains and crypto are a way of agreeing on objective reality. It’s not the objective reality. That’s a philosophical black hole we’ll ignore for now, but it’s an objective reality. It’s two parties agreeing on a version of past events. The third entry in the system, entered into the blockchain, is both a receipt and a transaction. It’s proof that something happened between two parties, which goes beyond the receipts that each party holds in double entry.
But all that is theoretical. Why does it matter? What can you do with it?
So many things...
It’s more revolutionary than the cotton gin, the steam engine, the PC and the smart phone combined.
When people look back hundreds of years from now, only the printing press and the Internet will have it beat for sheer mind-boggling impact on society. Both the net and the printing press enabled the democratization of information and single-handedly uplifted the collective knowledge of people all over the world.
So what am I talking about? What did Ijiri create that’s so amazing?
Triple-entry accounting...
So why is it so important if nobody knows about it?
Because the first application for it didn’t come along until 2008 and so it’s real impact is still to come. But make no mistake, it’s coming like a tsunami that will remake every aspect of our lives and societies...
Most people missed Professor Ijiri’s breakthrough because it straddles two equally obscure and poorly understood fields: cryptography and accounting...
Ijiri published his work in 1989. It passed mostly unacknowledged by the general public...
Then, in 2006/2007, a self-taught programmer likely stumbled on one or both of the systems. He was working on an alternative currency, with no centralized trust.
It was called Bitcoin.
It was the first working example of triple-entry accounting...
Triple-entry accounting and by extension blockchains and crypto are a way of agreeing on objective reality. It’s not the objective reality. That’s a philosophical black hole we’ll ignore for now, but it’s an objective reality. It’s two parties agreeing on a version of past events. The third entry in the system, entered into the blockchain, is both a receipt and a transaction. It’s proof that something happened between two parties, which goes beyond the receipts that each party holds in double entry.
But all that is theoretical. Why does it matter? What can you do with it?
So many things...
