[GNC] new namespaces for tokens and commodities

[Jim DeLaHunt]

On 2021-08-18 21:51, Weiwu Zhang wrote:
> ...I'd propose two additional namespaces parallel to the current
> "Currency" namespace: Tokens and Commodity
>
> Tokens: this is for all types of payment tokens that are typically
> called "Something Dollar" where something is an industry or company
> name. They are typically pegged to a currency. "BarterCard Dollar" is
> such an example. There are community dollars that is used only in a
> city or a community group which can roughly fall into this category.
> Commodity: this includes all kinds of a commodity that can be used for payment.
>
> I'll simply propose that Tokens have an issuing company, such as
> Qantas Points are issued by Qantas, while Commodity does not. Bitcoin
> roughly falls into Commodity since they are not issued by any
> organisation or individual. We can maintain a commodity list in
> GnuCash officially and let Tokens be user-defined.
>
> This allows Bitcoin to be accounted in GnuCash without official
> endorsing Bitcoin as a currency. Instead, I propose GnuCash supports
> commodity accounts, a type of non-currency account that can be used to
> transact without buying/selling the commodity first.
>
> The programming work doesn't sound much to me. We can ignore the
> six-digit precision problem (Bitcoin typically use 8 digits past the
> decimal point). Is anyone interested and would such work be accepted?
> I'm interested in sponsoring some of the efforts.

Hello, Weiwu Zhang:

There was a related conversation in the gnucash-devel list in the last 
few weeks. See subject "[GNC-dev] Crypto Currencies" in the archives at 
<https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2021-July/045900.html> 
and 
<https://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2021-August/045923.html>. 
The most helpful paragraphs were probably this:

On 2021-08-01 02:44, Frank H. Ellenberger wrote:
> we have already a long standing RFE
> https://bugs.gnucash.org/show_bug.cgi?id=690479  but nobody had time to
> work on it.
>
> The main problem can be seen in
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217#Unofficial_codes_for_cryptocurrencies
> Many conflicts with ISO 4217. So we want the cryptos in a separate
> namespace "userdefined".
>
> So we are searching for volunteers, who implement the currency namespace
> "userdefined".

So, perhaps you would like to read bug 690479, and add your thoughts to it?

Best regards,

      —Jim DeLaHunt