Quote from: Peter Lambert on July 04, 2013, 11:44:14 AM

But now we know a bit more about "goodwill". Is it used in the same way in this accounting standard as described in the wikipedia quote? (If somebody wants to cite a better source than wikipedia, that would be great too)

Fundamentally, the account plan has three account types in it: 1, 2 and 3.

One is stuff that's for all practical purposes liquid BTC. If a payment out of 1 is decided, the operator getting through his payment mechanism is the highest latency of the entire process. This is pretty well equivalent to the fiat notion of cash, wherein the time it takes the person to get their wallet out/sign the check/type the pin is the larger hurdle.

Two is stuff that certainly has a BTC value, but that value may not be as liquid. This is pretty close to the fiat notion of tangible property, such as your house or a car or a coffee table book about coffee tables. While it's clear that the stuff has some resale value, it's not clear exactly what it is, and moreover that would probably depend on how much time is available. You'll get a better price for your house or for the coffee table book if you get to wait for buyers rather than have to be a seller.

Three is stuff that has no BTC resale value. It just can't be sold as an item, like your experience of a soda can's fizzle can't later be sold by you as such. This stuff is however not exactly worthless, in the following perspective: if we're trying to recreate the company from scratch it may be a required cost. This contrasts with buying the company to strip it down, like in a liquidation, in which case we simply ignore the third account. There's no convenient synonymous concept for this third account in fiat, like we had cash and "tangibles" for the other two. For the sake of comprehensibility it was named "intangibles and goodwill", not as two separate items but as a single term, to denote all that which isn't cash and isn't resellable on its own. You can't distinguish the "goodwill" part of the third account, and contrast it with the "intangible" part, as it's one single account and not thus divisible. The compound structure of the name just reflects an inadequacy of the English language for this application and not more.

This three-account approach has the advantage that while still keeping things simple enough (and indeed for the fiat-formatted minds "too simple"), it also brings into accounting focus the foremost valuation problem, which is to say the difference between corp-valuation-as-is versus corp-valuation-as-it'd-cost-to-rebuild-from-scratch. People with any experience in the VC game will instantly recognize these as "what the VC would like to value at" and "what the founders would like to value at", respectively.

Once we grok this much we might move on, but so far a) we're too full of our own farts to grok why we should working our butts off to grok it in the first place; b) we're not really there yet anyway, as there's precious little actual entrepreneurship going on and c) it might turn out it is actually good enough.