Today’s episode is in response to a question from Steven Ulmer about the challenges of reporting using Blockchain.

The development of papyrus in ancient Egypt was a breakthrough technology, but today if one needs to write a contract or record transactions in a ledger, it’s not that expensive to buy a piece of paper. Deciding what to write down is much, much more expensive.  It still often requires professionals, in lawyers and accountants.

By and large, blockchain is like a blank sheet of paper; one can record anything on the blockchain.  The real expense comes in determining what to record.  And that means that each transaction of a block chain can have a completely different set of attributes.  This becomes a major problem when it comes to reporting.

Reporting processes are dependent upon consistency in data structures.  Have you ever tried to search for a transaction that has some strange category designator, or that you couldn’t remember the name of the store where the transaction was done?  Our reporting processes are dependent upon aggregations by place, and time, and categories, people and businesses.  When all these attributes are different on each record of the blockchain, it complicates reporting processes; it does not facilitate them.

This is Episode 144 of Conversation with Kip, the best Financial Systems Vlog there is. Learn more, literally–about ledgers and financial systems–at LedgerLearning.com.