Syncing Data vs Balancing Books

Balancing the books is a function of the double entry book keeping system.

Syncing records is a function of data store maintenance.

How are these two concepts the same?

How do they differ?

Is balancing the books simply old school methodology of what syncing data stores does with modern technology?

If so then why continue to maintain an old concept?  A concept that was the best that could be done considering the constraints of data information management prior to the modern Information Age.

Is "Balancing the Books" an institutionalized old concept that remains ingrained in the current system to the extent it has become a detrimental to the conceptual structure of the current monetary system?

Intuitively I woke up this morning with that idea in my head and answered my own question.

Yes, I think so.

Now I must examine the two concepts in order to answer the prior questions and determine the validity of what my intuition tells me.

Hello Google!  Please tell me.............and when I put together all that you and the WWW tell me and I think about all of it then maybe I can judge my intuition.

Balancing the Books

defined here as:

Closing up of accounts at the end of an accounting period, by bringing the totals of their debit and credit sides into agreement, and thus to determine the profit or loss made during that period.

I learned that in high school.  Bob Cratchit did that for Ebenezer Scrooge before he could go home on Christmas Eve.   It was an administrative task necessary to fulfill a management requirement to determine profit or loss.  This excerpt is a humorous alternate version:

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Fuuuuuture,” he spoke in a mildly mocking baritone.
“My future?” Scrooge asked.
“Well, in the future, it’s really hard to delineate between the personal and the collective in an exponential destiny.”
As if to prove his point, the spirit snapped his finger and the two were suddenly facing a stately mansion.
“Is this mine?”
“No. No. This is the home of Bob Cratchit.”
“My penniless bookkeeper.”
“Not penniless anymore. And not a bookkeeper. In fact, once automation forced most manual bookkeepers out of work, Cratchit created a social network for former workers to crowdsource for new job opportunities. It IPOed a few years ago. I think the market cap is, like, $6 billion.”
Scrooge saw Bob Cratchit’s wife in the window. She stood next to a three-dimensional replication machine, printing out mittens for her extended brood.

Times change.  Scrooge went forward in time to the Information Age. 

In a Tim Burton version, Scrooge might be transported to a future of today where double entry book keeping still reigns supreme as the conceptual model institutionalized into our society as debits and credits.  It exists as the conceptual organizing thought for money long after its associated administrative task was given to our information machines. Debt and debt owners who call them assets was alive and well.  The proof was in the barren austerity in which people lived.  Scrooge would look around and feel right at home again in the future

Scrooge was the 1% of Charles Dicken's time.  The Debit/Credit concept continued to rule in the future world.  Times had not changed the conditions resulting from that the concept applied by the few that owned the monetary system to the many that owned used it.  The many still did not own the system even although they had the sovereign right to own it.  They sold that right to the Federal Reserve Bank the cold night of December 23, 1913 for little coal to heat their rented homes.

Was the story about the legislation a conspiracy?  While the details of how it was done might have been spun into a good story the facts are that the Federal Reserve Bank was give a monopolistic charter to create the nation's money supply in return its promises to meet requirements for stability and full employment plus a handful of coal to seal the deal. We still have a hand full of coal and empty promises.

Why?  Might the reason be that times have changed and the double entry booking debit credit concept still rules us?  The big issue today is Debt.  On a national systemic level of National Debt which is Government Debt which is the same as Public Debt.  National Debt exists to satisfy the double entry bookkeeping rule that Debt and Assets must always balance.  If there is to be a total money thing asset account there must be a balancing money thing debt account.  That is accounting administration as dictated by Scrooge in his day to use money to create profit.

What was Scrooge's line of business?

It is usually assumed that he is a banker or professional money lender. Some recent versions portray him as a solicitor. Whatever his main business is, he seems to have usurious relationships with people of little means. These relationships, along with his lack of charity and shabby treatment of his clerk, Bob Cratchit, seem to be his major vices.

Syncing:

Defined here as:

File synchronization (or syncing) in computing is the process of ensuring that computer files in two or more locations are updated via certain rules. 

Two data files updated to be equal, if equality is the golden rule, which it generally is.  The same rule that bankers apply to balancing money accounts.  The same rule that applied to balancing gold on a scale to an offsetting equal weight at the other end of the balance arm.  Balancing

Bankers historically as well as currently use balancing to assure that their data in two files called accounts with two sub types called Debit and Credit were equal.  If not there is a problem. 

Looks to me, so far, that what bankers have called balancing the books for thousands of years is now called file syncing.  Why wasn't it always called file syncing?  Thousands of years ago the balancing machine was a weight scale.  Today the balancing machine is called a computer.  A computer does more than balance physical object things.  What it can balance is information in general as well as physical things conceptualized in any system of abstract enumeration for measurement of both real and conceptual things.

The beauty of a computer is not only a tool to do conceptual balancing but it operates in a network where the two things to be balanced do not even have to be on the same computer!

For example:  Sync your itunes!  You can sync them not only with the central computer but among all the computers that you own for which you have registered authorization.  The program operates to bring everything into balance.

But where is the debit/credit concept of balancing equality in syncing?   

Syncing balances mirrored existence  of a conceptual thing in two different places of virtual existence the virtual existence of the conceptual thing has at a very low level a physical connection to where it exists in time and space.  The computers it exist on in its elemental digital form of a one or a zero, a presence or an absence in a package sequence that can be interpreted to higher level abstract representation symbols like......letters and numbers or musical notes or pictures or anything we can imagine.

It seems to me that that the debit/credit concept of money is fundamentally a high level conceptual application of logical presence/absence thinking that is the core concept of information representation at the most basic binary level of our digital computer storage and processing devices and the networks that connect them.

Money is a conceptually constructed system devised on exactly the same binary presence/absence logic that is the foundation of our Information Age.  When the concept of money was created, the conceptual structure of presence or absence was implemented at a very high level.  

Initially, the presence or absence of a weight on a balancing scale used the law of nature constant called gravity to assure accuracy and consistency.  In direct barter it was the weight of one actual thing for another.  Then maybe it became something plus something on one side to balance the thing on the other.  Moving the level of abstract conceptual representation of a thing farther from its physical representation was a progression that lead to gold.  The progression of gold as conceptual abstraction lead to paper money, paper money progressed to account entries on paper accounts.  Paper accounts have gone to digital accounts.  The highest possible level of conceptual abstraction representation short of spirituality where there is no link to anything physical.  Or is there?  I will not go there....Computer level is far enough for this investigation.  

Our historical macro conceptual thinking in terms of Presence/Absence abstraction logic has not gone done to the lowest level processing where Presence/Absence is a pure binary lowest level of existence in a the world of physical laws that we employ to so wonderful things with in modern times.

That macro level of thinking still exists in the conceptual structure of our debit/credit money system at the account level.  An historical concept from history institutionalized at the highest level called National Public Debt that is responsible for our greatest social problems today.  The application of Presence/Absence logic must move from the binary account level where it is called balancing the books to the binary digital syncing level made possible by computers in a network system.

The tool we have to resolve (re-solve) the conceptual system we call money is at our disposal!!!!

All we have to do is use it to sync instead of balance.  There is no presence or absence of money as a debit or a credit.  There is only money as an asset at our disposal when the management of its very existence is moved down to the same place we have moved so much of our conceptual world in order to make the concepts we have created serve us better.

Digital Dollars existing as serialized units with association to owning entities are positive money with no off-setting balance of negative money.  The only thing that must balance is the combined relationship of money to all users at the macro, central virtual source level with the existence of that same relationship at the micro user/owner level.

The two levels of money, the macro and micro only have to sync to tell us the system is under control and operating correctly as far as the system itself is concerned.  How we choose to use that good system is up to us.

It is the binary presence or absence at the lowest level that makes the system work and where the system syncs.  The absence component of money must be moved down to that level leaving the asset component of money at a high level for us to use as a the best tool to apply to the regulation, maintenance, operation and improvement of our world.

Syncing is a well established model in our world today.  All we have to do is re-design money to this system.  Keep the conceptual presence of the logical unit of money at the highest level, move the absence aspect of the logical unit down to the lowest level where it exists in conceptual fact zero, nothing.

We are our own victim if we continue a concept that was the best we could come up with thousands of years ago when the march of time and technology have revealed ways to harness our natural world and our conceptual world to better serve us, or us and our institutions to exist in balance with them.

Balance vs Sync.  At the concept level, the two words are representative opposite ends of the spectrum from the physical to the conceptual world over which we have traveled since we first started to think.  Some of our thinking about conceptual things is way behind the ability we have to use our heads.  Money is one of those things.  We got stuck with an old concept that should not exist in view of our capabilities to manage abstract concepts today.