From a recent series of exchanges on a social media platform that turned next into connecting for a video conversation on the topic, here we take the initiative to start and invite a conversation in the CUB forum about “triple entry accounting” (TEA) and it’s relevance for blockchain decentralized ledger technology.
One of the provocative expressions from Ian’s paper on TEA (2005, 2024) is simply the proposition in a section title of: “Extending the Humble Invoice.” What would that mean in the era of digital receipts? What kind of new digital receipts are we facing in the years ahead? Does it mean more people needing to learn about the proper way(s) to have TEA together, since the ‘triple’ stands for a ‘public’ ledger?
Below we’ll begin to add some resources and share a bit of TEA history for people interested to read more about it and how it adds and calculates value in blockchain ecosystems. Please be welcome to join the conversation, make further suggestions or recommendations as this is a new and growing field of study and application.
How can our bitcoin & blockchain focus of attention & conversation shift away from ‘crypto’ topics to instead exploring more in depth how, from and to whom peoples’ humble invoices (can) extend?
Come join us for TEA and share a story or link about something to do with TEA and blockchain technology.
Here’s a link to the paper by Ian Grigg of the same title, refreshed in 2024, originally from 2025.
From the Conclusions:
“in evidentiary terms, the signed receipt is more powerful than double entry records due to the technical qualities of its signature and its agreement between the three parties. In this way, triple entry accounting challenges the 500 year reign of double entry; that which double entry did inside the firm, triple entry does between firms; what double entry did for the firm, triple entry does for the economy.”
“To fully benefit from triple entry bookkeeping, we have to expand accounting systems out to agents and offer them direct capabilities to do transactions.”
“the harder the problem, the better the algorist will perform.”
“We again find ourselves in a contest between two paradigms, and it is by no means certain how the battle will end. Perhaps our society will decide, as in ancient times, that the average person does not need to understand numbers and that we can entrust this knowledge to an elite caste. If so, the bridge to science and higher mathematics will become closed to many more people than it is today.” https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9662.pdf
I am fairly new with accounting and it’s landscape. Is the third entry on the chain, debit and credit would be on their own private ledger but adding the chain - would be the third entry?
This article gives a basic background introduction to TEA & begins to address its role in the bitcoin & blockchain space (though it misses that Theodore Ezersky, who invented triple entry accounting in the 1870s in St. Petersburg, Russia):
Jeffries, Daniel (2017). “Why Everyone Missed the Most Mind-Blowing Feature of Cryptocurrency.” Hackernoon.
The content of the ‘third entry’ presents the proverbial rub & raises several questions: Which ‘public’ (e.g. just those who run full network nodes)? Whose ‘public’? Does it make a difference if the ‘public’ is actually ‘private’? How ‘private’ can a ‘public’ ledger be? What designates the movement between ‘private’ & ‘public’ ledgers? Who can audit a ‘private’ or ‘public’ ledger? Does ‘the public’ of a shared ledger ecosystem get a say in what constitutes ‘the public’ as a voluntary choice? Etc.
