Alice and Bob meet Alberti and Pacioli: Towards an Accounting for Cryptography

Abstract

Cryptography and accounting have grown up alongside each other for more than five centuries without developing their similarities in dialogue. This extended concept note outlines a vision for a crossdisciplinary research programme integrating six philosophical dimensions: ontological, epistemological, axiological, teleological, praxiological and phenomenological. It explicates only the structural (ontological) dimension in detail, arguing that asymmetric verifiability (whereby the cost of engineering a false acceptance is deliberately set to exceed the cost of verifying a true one) is foundational to both disciplines: in cryptography to one-way functions, digital signatures and zero-knowledge proofs, and in accounting to conservatism in the Basu (1997) and Watts (2003) tradition. The remaining five dimensions are stated concisely and anchored to established literature on each side, with the lived practice of each craft identified as the least studied and the clearest opening for joint work, particularly in the context of post-quantum cryptography (PQC). The present contribution is the naming of the six-dimension structure rather than local novelty within any single dimension; prior scholarship has already placed Alberti’s cryptography and Pacioli’s bookkeeping within a common Renaissance tradition addressing trust at a distance. The note develops a role-to-treatment taxonomy and worked ledger illustrations (a TLS certificate issuance and two distinct quantum exposures: harvest-now-decrypt-later and trust-now-forge-later), and closes with a call for collaboration between cybersecurity and accounting researchers.