yes i agree. just to clarify my position, what i was describing was a hack, since bitcoin organizationally currently seems to lack any real good, clear mechanism for collecting capability needs information from the commerce community, digesting it, and coming out with solutions that make sense.
the fact that transactions can be backed out in a reorg or re-positioned in time alone would drive accountants crazy.
"oh woops reorg now the money came in on Wednesday morning not Tuesday night..."
try to explain that to a revenue recognition auditor...
in the real business world, some discounts disappear at midnight at the end of a fiscal year, and if that company does not have the contract and/or payment on the books it doesn't count. hence there needs to be something that stops transactions from floating around unconfirmed for days, or longer.
The accounting world will have to adapt to bitcoin. They will
not be dragging their current fiat notions into bitcoin intact.
For some strange reason, plenty of people on this forum think that the rules of accounting were handed down to Moses on Sinai and have been passed down from father to son unchanged since then. This is, of course, nonsense. Accounting changes all the time.
Bitcoin does what it can. The block timestamp is the only time with any meaning for bitcoin. If that isn't good enough for the accounting industry, they will just have to come up with something else that does.
Same goes for everyone else, pretty much. I'm reasonably sure that the "commerce community" "needs" the "capability" to reverse transactions. Ain't gonna happen, so they'd better get over it sooner rather than later.
P.S. I can think of several ways to address your specific example that don't involve wishful thinking. 1) Don't wait until the last fucking minute. 2) Accept a receipt from an audited timestamping service as the effective time. 3) Accept the timestamp of an orphaned, but otherwise valid, block as the effective time. 4) Pay more fees.
