A while ago I put up a short post about the idea of cross-marginning my financial life.  https://wordpress.com/post/arhaik.com/835

I do not like tracking so many different aspect of my financial life; 401(k), mortgage, checking accounts, savings accounts, 529 plans, monthly bills, K-1’s, W-2’s, PayPal, Coinbase, on and on and on.  So the idea that you could have an available “balance sheet & income statement” of your financial life that you can choose to make available when you wish and to whom you wish would ease the pain of tracking your financial self.

There are some services out there that do some of the work like Intuit’s Mint platform.  Mint helps track your personal wealth, but it is self-reported and not considered valid information by any outside entity.

But what if there were a blockchain application that could track ALL aspects of your financial self?  For starters, it would still connect to current-day “accounts” as I listed above.  But eventually this blockchain-confirmed “personal balance sheet and income statement” would become those accounts.  No need for a Fidelity IRA & your 401(k) from that last job (and the associated paperwork and fees).  Your retirement balances would just be a part of your Retirement Assets under the blockchain.  Monthly invoices from the internet company, Amazon Prime, and the kid’s after school activities?  Record the invoices then auto pay from my blockchain account.  If I make my personal balance sheet (validated via blockchain technology) available to those vendors, they are likely to give me credit to pay at the end of each month.  In some cases people will not have a strong enough balance sheet to be extended credit by vendors.

The obstacles here are clear and massive.  The current global economy is strongly tied to the current global financial services industry.  None of those entities want to be disrupted.  But will any of them take on the challenge of making this a possibility?  Hard to say.  I’ll keep refining this idea and keep updating when I do.