Could decentralized ledgers change the face of accounting?

When I speak to people about decentralised ledgers, some of them are interested in the “distributed trust” aspects of the technology. But, more often, they bring up the question of cost.

This confused me at first. Think back to where this all started: with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is deliberately less efficient than a centralized ledger! Its design adds really difficult engineering constraints to what we already had. How could this technology possibly be cheaper than what we already have?

And yet the claims keep coming. So perhaps this “cost” claim deserves closer consideration. Perhaps there are some scenarios where the “cost” camp might be right?

Ledgers

So much comment in this space talks about “distributed ledgers” or “decentralized ledgers”. But there is very little reflection on what we actually mean by “ledger”.

Investopedia has a good definition of a General Ledger:

A company’s…