Quote from: Accountant on November 28, 2012, 08:17:25 PM

I am an accountant by training, and am absolutely horrified by the way that bitcoin miners present their financial information to potential creditors and investors. I am really interested in developing a financial reporting standard for these miners to help investors and creditors understand the risk and benefits associated with their decisions.

Does anybody else agree?

First of all, welcome to Bitcoin. Next, posting in the newbies section of the forum is perhaps not the best way to get the attention of miners. There is a separate mining section.

Third, standard for where? Bitcoin is trans-national, so what makes sense to a US investor may be different for one in a different country, as far as how the data is presented and what terms are used. I'm not an accountant, so correct me if I am wrong on that point and there are accepted international standards.

Fourth, what is the incentive for miners to use a standard? If they are raising enough funds as is, and there are no regulatory requirements to meet, they may be happy with the current situation. I think you need a stronger argument to get acceptance of such a standard.

Fifth, my understanding is the Bitcoin network is a distributed account book with means of transferring balances between accounts. "Mining" is the process of updating and verifying the transaction history. A "bitcoin" is an arbitrary unit in the account book, which only has the value people give it by exchanging it for other goods and moving balances. How you define what mining is and what bitcoins are would seem to be a critical part of any standard. I would be interested in what your understanding is.

Note: "Bitcoin" capitalized usually refers to the software client people download, and the P2P network that delivers transactions. "bitcoins" uncapitalized usually refers to the units in the transaction history. People often confuse the two.