How safe is GnuCash?

John Whitmore arigead at gmail.com
Mon Jan 30 08:41:51 EST 2017


On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 08:10:18PM +0100, 70147persson at telia.com wrote:
> How safe is GnuCash? No, I am not talking about lack of bugs etc, but from
> an auditor's point of view. How to secure that no one is manipulating the
> figures in the book? The best way of book keeping is an, in advance

Sorry for late reply but been away/distracted, catching up on mailing list
now.

Other people have already provided the solution to this problem which is the
Block Chain, developed for BitCoin. That's the most interesting technology in
the BitCoin. It's designed so that nobody can tamper with transactions. 

OK Strictly speaking that's not true if you can get half the population of
BitCoin users on your side then you can convice the network that your vesion
of the truth is in fact the truth.

The problem with a digital currency was to stop double spend of "money" so if
I spend bitcoin number 123 today I can't keep a note of the number and spend
it again tomorrow. There are other ways to manipulate a system but in the case
of the block chain every change to the records is transmitted to everybody
participating in the bitcoin currency. So if I spend bitcoin #123 today on one
side of the globe, and then attempt to spend it tomorrow on the other side of
the globe the whole network knows I don't actually own that bitcoin so can't
re-spend it.

The block chain is a digital record of every single change to the data, in
this case currency, spread between millions of intersted parties, everybody
using BitCoin. That's why BitCoin is so limited in terms of scalability.

Now to go back to the origional problem of an accounting package you could use
the block chain but who is your network of interested parties? You have a
limited network of perhaps 4 or 5 people who are interested in your accounts
and who of them is external to the company? As I understand it an auditor or
the government would only be interested in your books once a year. And even if
that was not the case the block chain, as I understand it, is governed by
majority rule. So if the version of the truth held by 3 or 4 members internal
to the company out votes an external party and their version is the truth.

Having said all that if this was a problem then surely the governments of the
world would be trying to resolve it? So the mechanism to solve the problem
exists and is being applied to various areas, but is it worth solving in this
case?


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