Financial cryptography is the science of cryptography applied for the purpose of exchanges of value, such as digital cash.

Distributed financial systems are those systems operating on the internet analogous to multi-company ledgers which enable intercompany accounting entries between unrelated companies as well as within consolidated group companies.

The global economic system, in all its complexity and diversity, is comprised of discrete money exchanges.  These exchanges are not at all ambiguous, viewed in retrospect.    Every monetary exchange does have an amount, date, and associated facts about who, when, where, how, and what was exchanged.  These exchanges are sometimes observable and formalized in accounting entries, sometimes not.   But the theoretical model is the same.  The global economy is truly a single, integrated arithmetic model.  If all the facts were known, it would not even be very challenging to maintain the entire hypercube in a single data center-- the lifetime increases and decreases in the net worth of every citizen on the planet.

Voluntarily, quite a lot of integration has already occurred between the accounting systems of large corporations who are 100% independently owned. The resulting economies and operational efficiency makes this very compelling.  This requires no surrender of sovereignty or business advantage whatsoever, to external trading partners.   The terms of trade and powers of execution are completely independent to the approaches to mechanical, downstream accounting.

Right now there is a terrible muddle, and gridlock in the design of distributed financial systems.  First of all, society is nearly completely ignorant of their capability and choice to integrate with the already enormous globally-integrated financial and accounting systems. 

Secondly there is a terrific opposition of interests in which powerful men in banking, software, and telecoms professions are staring at each other, through gritted teeth, with their hands gripping the exact same levers of the exact same, single machine.  They cannot say in any coherent way, precisely what they are gridlocked about, but seem possessed by a vain belief that changing the design of EDI or XML systems would actually bring them transfers of actual wealth, somehow, or change the outcome of everybody's buying and selling decisions.

Thirdly, there are very big potential changes brought about in business and society by the existence of internet and the rest of the modern industrial state, which society has barely begun to digest.

As you can see, I have wearied of typing inspiring little essays about accounting systems, and reviewing todays' web-based accounting systems.  Today's web applications are almost totally lacking in any planning or implementation to participate in global financial integration.  They are almost totally oriented around some particular food source, gathering revenue for survival and nothing else.

 In light of the World Trade Center, particularly, society itself is going to have to examine a number of broader issues of safety, law enforcement, privacy, computer security.  Until society itself achieves a mature level of discourse, only isolated companies and individuals will migrate into the global, distributed financial system.  Here are some links for you, today.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pagre/message/249

Todd