After debating whether to move forward by coding a market implementation package or documenting the IS Plan more throughly, I have decided to allocate more time on the latter. I intend to finish drafting additional pending documents for Q2 2009, and to move to market implementation packaging for the second half of this year.
While I feel that practical demonstrations are always more convincing and more easily grasped than written plans, there is a clear need to explain the ‘tyaga’ approach to currency design that lists information system functional requirements and shows the strategy for the separation of concerns. This need became more apparent after I drafted the prowl_layers diagram. Even though there are now more systems that use the publication-oriented approach, tyaga’s IS Plan seems to be unique in positioning the accounting system as a layer that feeds the publisher platform, rather than the other way around as illustrated in the prowl_vs_twollars diagram. I hope to explain the rationale behind this design consideration in the planned document drafts for this quarter.
For now, I will simply note that responsible market entities typically maintain independent accounting systems and ledgers. It would be easier to ask each entity to build on top of what it already uses, to independently declare its own budgets and to self-regulate against those budgets — the only additional effort will be to publish market objectives, periodic tallies and flow records in conventional formats in order to promote accountability and auditability. In contrast, I am skeptical of the perceived benefits/costs in putting the accounting system and transaction control as a layer above the publisher platform.
