Anders, continuing our dialog, 1. The point of having an embedded GL in a handheld device is not to keep your books in it permanently, but that it can appear as a subledger, and its data can be rolled up into your root ledger (or the webledger or ASP you mentioned) . Clearly, handheld devices are being used to conduct business, hardwired to hosts. These hosts include services acting for the owner (acting as Me), as well as trading partners, or 3rd party intermediaries. None of those scenarios require a GL nor can a GL succeed anyway, since a portal is a portal, after all and doesn't release data.
2. I said, if you want a standard to be widely adopted then it must respect the privacy and the sovereignty of the owner. You replied, " >Again referring to the P-Card context, this is a matter of company >policy as you are dealing with other peoples money." That's also true. One might consider this at a higher level of abstraction. All businesses, large and small, assign powers to various people and use varying degrees of internal control. The question is, does the corporate sector want to carry on another 10 years beating its head against the wall with EDI and centrally controlled systems? They cannot achieving an efficient back office, until most of the SMEs and individuals they touch are conducting business electronically. As a matter of self-interest, large companies should deploy architectures that give the individual and smaller trading partner privacy, autonomy, and processing efficiency. Within that architecture, certainly, the large corporation will find the internal control they need, as well as back office efficiencies. Again, what's stopping this vision is the camel who has gotten his nose under the tent (portals, intermediaries, and yes banks.) The technical architecture is not difficult to perceive, in which data flows across company boundaries, and the same business process standards, vocabulary, and software modules are used internally as externally. The May release from http://www.ebxml.org/ is entering quite a new, exciting phase with whole new categories of goals, such as business document definitions. What's holding back progress is prevalence today of business software that is designed to achieve an asymmetry of benefit for its owner, in terms of the information itself. There is a design decision NOT to share information. These software are not entirely unsuccessful. When you look closely the benefits are temporary. Look at the history of capitalism itself; enterprise moves from country to country looking for new cheap workforces, who work for a generation or two before striking for higher wages. Similarly, the IT industry has for many years, mined the ignorance from customer and supplier populations until it was depleted like a mineral. Yes, this is a long term business model, I suppose, not temporary. The end state of this progression is when substantially all of the people in the market understand the value of information and stop giving it away for free. And when they understand that alternative customers and suppliers exist, and stop obeying authority. My goal is to find ways that the code itself can change the rules, and allow some of us to "graduate" from this stage and move onto the next stage without being held back by things like Passport, P-cards, credit cards, paypal, or fifty other portal schemes that steal our privacy and autonomy of action and prevent us from having our own independent reputations. Today only the financial institutions have a global view of parties, their histories, who we buy and sell from, and whether we pay our bills. They have, in effect stolen our reputations, and we want them back. Financial institutions lobbying for privacy laws means, only the banks shall know. The small business shall not know. The small business shall not have the independent means to evaluate credit, or the independent means to provide views of their own history to gain credit approval from somebody besides their own bank. >I see a problem of having the general ledger in my PDA. I think that >you without any major problem can have data on an ASP/Portal etc. >that serves as "the store". This ASP is typically a company >server (B2B) or [ultimately] a home server (B2C), that offers >backup cap. and processing. > >P2P is a favorite of mine but I think that limiting the peer >to a potentially stolen or failing device have too serious limitations >to become the norm. >I rather see PDAs as a *link* to the peer. The peer itself should be as >bullet-proof as justified by its value. Note that the real boon with >a PDA with strong auth. cap. is that you may have *many* peers. > >Like in http://www.mobilephones-tng.com > >Using that scheme the only "true" P2P is really user identification. >All other activities go through linked "fake-peers". Yes I have observed your creations at http://www.google.com/search?q=anders+rundgren+cyberphone My reaction is, you're doing something in parallel with MeT? What is the difference? MeT has fifty huge corporations agreeing on standards and building prototypes. A vendor distributed samples of the PTD at the May meeting. www.mobiletransactions.org They are meeting today in Barcelona. My company hopes to allow MeT devices to sign financial transactions such as purchase orders and payments directly from inside the accounting system. You can send any arbitrary contract to the PTD for signature. Anyway -these solutions are a different layer of the "stack" than my job. My job is to figure out how to *use* all these marvelous tools. I ask the question "What would an intelligent person do, to use these existing technologies, NOT as they were intended by the portal schemes of all these companies, but for independent gain? How can we make gainful use of these things, in a way that gives incremental benefit in the beginning? And, what characteristics should we look for, to predict the technology that will still be around in 5 years?" (I guess, autonomy and sovereignty, among others) > >This AR/AP vision depends on sellers extending credit to customers. > >Sellers need the independent means to check the creditworthiness > >of customers. This will come from traditional credit agencies only > >as a last resort; reputation metrics instead will need to come from > >webs of trust, and from ledger reputation metrics of the AR/AP > >fabric itself. > >The web of trust seems like a wonderful idea in *theory* but few >are really interested to vouch for other parties for *nothing*. I.e. I have >no problems saying that my friends are indeed are trustworthy folks, >but that is not the same as saying I guarantee that these >guys pays always their bills in time. Technicalities like >the hardships of PKI-deployment, also speak for collection >of business data in spite of that this indeed is a "stinking" business. > >Anders I agree, nobody is going to reply to email requests, type letters of recommendation etc. ! I got a laugh out of that idea! The mechanisms for reputation metrics is entirely theoretical but it would have to be automatic of course; how else could it be robust? As Lawrence Lessig says, people don't follow rules, the software code rules. PKI also, is a real laugh. You're not going to see global ecommerce based on full PKI with all its key management. PKI infra is for large corps who need to maintain largescale control which are essentially command systems. My job is to figure out what 6 billion people are going to do, not the global 2000 corporations. They have all the brilliant guys, maintaining their hierarchic command systems. The economy will anyways, continue to dissolve into more and more subcontractors and autonomous actors. I think it would be a mistake to focus on who maintains keys and how they are being maintained, because there are many fine solutions in financial cryptography already. What you want to focus on, is who is trying to achieve an information advantage? What are the assymmetries of information access, access to markets etc.? If you find architectures that are a level playing field, that don't confer advantages where none existed before --- those are the architectures that have a long term life, Hope I didn't offend anybody, this is my opinion only, Respectfully, Todd Todd Boyle CPA 9745-128th Ave NE Kirkland WA [EMAIL PROTECTED] 425-827-3107 my employer www.netaccount.com our project www.arapxml.net website www.gldialtone.com
