Who Owns What?

There is a point to the prior blog entry beyond the amusement of claiming ownership bragging rights.  Ownership is an important conceptual thing in our lives.  Change in ownership is an important function of Ownership.

Who owns what? is a conceptual "Parent/Child" relationship question that is a structural foundation of Object Oriented Analysis.  The simple idea is:  Children inherit attributes and methods of the parent.

Analysis aimed at establishing entity relationships begins with asking: What is this entity's Parent and Children.  Simple to start.  It gets complex quickly but Object Oriented Design OOD tools help to get it all organized for programming, which is even more complex but has its tools too.

In our current digital monetary system amounts of money are a Child of a Parent called Account.  Accounts have a multitude of children among which one is currency in digital form broadly called Money Supply.  Money in digital form cannot exist without relationship to an owning Account.  In our current digital Money Supply world there are no digital money orphans.  Digital Money Children that have no immediate Parent Account.  All Digital Money amounts must have a relationship to a Parent Account.  If your parents did not have any children you can't either.

In the digital domain "Money Account" is the Parent of the Child "Money Amount".  What entity is the Parent of "Money Account"?  Ultimately the Parent entity up the line of Parent/Child relationships it is not "What" but "Who".   That is true if the rule is:  All money is "owned" at any given time by somebody.  Money is a social decision making tool.  While it may be entrusted in some manner to an entity making decisions with it, it looks to me like at the top of the Parent/Child relationship chain is a private person or collective of private persons.  All of our Money Supply currency is the sovereign domain of our government.  We the People.  That is the highest level Parent in the Monetary System. 

What money do we all own as the highest collective Parent of our own Monetary System?

We own the National Debt.

What is the ultimate child of the digital Monetary System.  The child entity that is the parent of no child?  I contend that it is a numerical entity representation of value related to a Parent Account.  That is bottom line of my account held by a financial institution doing accounting for my money.  What I call my money may not be "my" money.  It could be in my account because I borrowed it.  An equal amount is in the account of someone that I owe the borrowed money to.   That account owner would call it their money.  It is a time thing.  A function of time depending on a contract.

It is a strange system!  The system can be explained.  However the explanation is difficult to understand.  Nobody really understands it. That may be a feature.  That may be a problem.  A feature to those few that understand it.  A problem to those that do not.

It should not be so complicated!

That is my conception of our digital currency system from the view point of Parent/Child Object Oriented entity relationships.

Change the Parent a Child belongs to and relations throughout its entire system change.  That is true for human Parent/Child relationships.  That relationship to Mother/Father pervades the human race.  Change that to a new Mother/Father and the results are significant.  Not so significant if the child continues to eat, sleep and live its life as before regardless of the change if emotional attachment is not considered.Money pervades the life of people world wide.  Make changes in the established Parent/Child digital money system and the results are significant for the Parent entity of the Child Account.    Not much of a change for the owner of currency in the account that does the accounting for the number of currency units in the account.  Money is money. 

New System of Accounting enters.

Peer to peer.  Peers being owners of currency in their account.  The account being a public ledger account for which there is no Institutional Accounting Entity other than the system itself.

This is a strange way of looking at it but in this new system digital currency becomes child's play.  It is always better when there are no adult parents around or their authoritarian presence is minimized. 

Call it Freedom.  We know the rules, they give us rights to play on a level field with boundaries.

Peer to peer currency systems still have a Parent problem when the Parent holds the purse.  The purse is the Parent to the children peers.  This is where the legacy Parent/Child Object Oriented entity relationship changes.  Dramatically for the Parent.  Not so much for the Child at first glance.  Look deeper however and there is a significant change, especially significant over time and we learn what the change can do for us.  The same thing that Peer to Peer Internet and World Wide Web have done over time.  Like boiling a frog.  The temperature increase is not noticeable over time but in this case it is a good thing when we come to realize what has happened.

The system is changing.  Spending money in an account with Apple Pay is still spending money as much as I may marvel at how the process has changed.  The transaction still gets me gas in the tank. 

Spending a peer to peer digital money still gets me gas in the tank but behind the accounting curtain there is no banking system using Swift to settlement juggling money among Accounting institutions.

There is also no ultimate debt base account that gave birth to the currency by loaning it into existence and to which the digital currency must be returned to pay off and extinguish itself reducing initial balance sheet debt that created it.  I call it revolving debt.  Same as revolving credit.  Debt sound more like what it really is.

I contend that peer to peer digital currency block chain systems are not debt based money systems.  They do not have a debt related Parent account structure.  There is no counter party debt.  It is a triple based accounting system as opposed to a two party balance sheet system where a banking system  institution is the third party maintaining accounts and creating money by loaning it into the system. 

In this revolutionary system Banks are no longer Parent entities creating Children Accounts into which is born a loan amount that is a variable number simply entered by a bank. That has some degree of self validating existence by the mere fact the same number was entered into two accounts.  One credit and one debit.  One an asset and one a liability.

Benevolent Parents care for their children and nurture them to become Parents themselves someday. 

Banks are not benevolent parents.  Some Parents that are not benevolent and want children to support them not just while they are growing but forever for their own banking self interest raise rebels that cut the Parent/Child relationship. 

Same goes for nations.  1776.

Blockchain is a very disruptive technology.  The legacy "keys to the kingdom" are held by a number of Parent entities in our world today.

With apologies to Mathew 16:19:

I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom...: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in the Blockchain; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in the Blockchain.

In a peer to peer digital currency system Banks not longer have the keys to the kingdom if they can't create debt money in a Bank Account.  Digital currency creates itself as a function of its first transaction being accepted.  All subsequent transactions validate themselves based on the first transaction and all subsequent transactions and associated amount being accepted.  

The Child called digital peer to peer currency gives birth to itself?

Lives forever?


The transition process from the legacy debt based system to a peer to peer blockchain accounting system?

When a legacy money system payment is made to a bank in settlement of a loan then the loan Account is extinguished, not the numerical amount of money paid to the bank.  That number value lives on as  units of currency in a limbo account to be loaned into circulation by the bank transaction called a loan of pre-existing units in a limbo account.  Over a cycle of the existing revolving debt account there will be less pure debt based money in existence as money no longer really goes out of existence.  It goes into the bank's loanable funds limbo blockchain account.

I'm no longer Catholic.  Haven't been since Vietnam.  However the fundamentals of the religion still have value.  The concept of Limbo as well as Incarnation of other religions have a conceptual system structure value.  I like the Limbo concept to perpetuate blockchain money Re-Incarnation loans by banks.  Banks can keep their own legacy balance sheet accounting systems to keep track of loans.  Loans however become merely one application of peer to peer blockchain currency.  Loans are no longer the Parent of all money.  Only that portion that is loaned.  

National Debt can extinguish itself in the same manner until there is only peer to peer money that went through limbo to be born again as or debt free based peer to peer blockchain currency.  A currency that only goes through limbo once.  That is unlike banks loaning peer to peer blockchain digital currency that revolves eternally through a limbo state in the blockchain, subject to appropriate money supply management on an open public ledger.

Who Owns What?

It is all our money.  All of it.  We own it.  We own the system if the system is public ledger blockchain digital currency.  We have the keys to the kingdom of money and finance.