Yahoo and Google start to list Bitcoin (BTC) currency

[John Ralls]

On Jul 6, 2014, at 3:30 PM, Rainer Dorsch <ml at bokomoko.de> wrote:

> Hi John,
> 
> On Saturday 28 June 2014 18:35:04 John Ralls wrote:
>> On Jun 28, 2014, at 6:19 PM, Rainer Dorsch <ml at bokomoko.de> wrote:
>>> On Saturday 28 June 2014 16:18:33 you wrote:
>>>> On Jun 28, 2014, at 12:20 PM, Rainer Dorsch <ml at bokomoko.de> wrote:
>>>>> Hello,
>>>>> 
>>>>> Yahoo and Google start to list the bitcoin currency
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/06/12/google-and-yahoo-finance-now-sho
>>>>> w->
>>>> 
>>>> the-price-of-bitcoin/
>>>> 
>>>>> e.g.
>>>>> 
>>>>> http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=BTCUSD=X
>>>>> 
>>>>> What is the status of the addition of BTC to gnucash?
>>>> 
>>>> You could use it now as a security (which the US Internal Revenue Service
>>>> requires), except that the max denominator is still 1E6. You could work
>>>> around that by using milli-bitcoin with a 1E5 max denominator.
>>>> 
>>>> 2.8 will be able to support the additional required precision, though
>>>> Christian Stimming and I are at the moment having a frank discussion
>>>> about
>>>> what's the best way to get there: See the "Rethinking Numerics" thread in
>>>> this list.
>>>> 
>>>> It isn't going to be treated as a currency until the ISO's 4217
>>>> Maintenance
>>>> Agency says it is one.
>>> 
>>> The downside of not treating it as a currency is that its "exchange" rates
>>> may not be maintained through finance::quote.
>>> 
>>> Why do you want to limit gnucash to the performance of a (slow moving?)
>>> standardization organization?
>> 
>> If it's a security, then it has prices rather than exchange rates, but that
>> has noting to do with Finance::Quote. If the quotes are available on Yahoo
>> in the same way that other securities and currencies are, then F::Q can get
>> the quotes.
> 
> I thought GnuCash fetches the exchange rates via F::Q, and Yahoo treats 
> bitcoin as a currency
> 
> 	http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=USDBTC=X
> 
> as they do e.g. with Euro
> 
> 	http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=USDEUR=X
> 
> Whereas securities follow this pattern
> 
> 	http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=goog
> 
> If GnuCash does not use F:Q to fetch exchange rates, then the only benefit of 
> treating it as currency that it is easy to transfer BTC from one 
> wallet/account to another wallet/account. That seems to me much more difficult 
> in GnuCash if you treat it as security.

Gnucash is only interested in the ratio. F::Q actually uses a CSV-formatted retrieval for Yahoo, but even where it's screen-scraping it abstracts out the other stuff so that we don't need to worry about it.

> 
>> 
>> Accounting is all about standards, and GnuCash is an accounting program.
>> Besides, in the USA at least bitcoin is legally a commodity and purchases
>> using bitcoin are barter exchanges:
>> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/bitcoin-is-property-not-currency-i
>> n-tax-system-irs-says.html That gives our position a legal basis as well.
>> AFAIK no other financial regulator has said anything about bitcoin's status
>> as a currency. Do you know of any such authority or convention that
>> recognizes bitcoin as legal tender?
> 
> This is the closest match I have
> 
> http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-pc-brown-legis-20140628-story.html

Governor Brown, for all that we Californians love him, does not have the authority to set Monetary Policy in the United States or even in California. The authority for the several states to issue their own currency was IIRC surrendered along with the Articles of Confederation in 1793.