alt Hacker NewsBut you don't need double entry to register increases or decreases of value; you could as well just use single-entry accounting and add or remove money from a single account, using transactions that are not transfers.
In the past this was problematic because you missed error-checking by redundance, but nowadays you can trust a computer to do all the checking with database transactions (which are more complex checks than double entry, though they don't need to be exposed into the business domain). Any tracking that you'd want to do with double-entry accounting could be done by creating single-entry accounts with similar meaning, and registering each transaction once, if you know that you can trust the transaction to be recorded correctly.
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You should stop presuming that you know more about what’s needed than an entire field of business practice and study. There is actual theory behind accounting. Accountants understand that there can be different views on the same underlying data, and the system they continue to choose to use has a lot of benefits. You seem to be really stuck on the idea that the mental model accounting as a profession finds useful doesn’t seem useful to you. But it doesn’t need to make sense to you.
I think this depends on what you consider to be the fundamental trait of double-entry accounting: the error-checking or the explanatory power.
It is true that by enforcing that value movement have both a source and a target, we make it possible to add a useful checksum to the system. But I believe this is a side benefit to the more fundamental trait of requiring all value flow to record both sides, in order to capture the cause for each effect.
I agree with your general perspective though: technology has afforded us new and different tools, and thus we should be open to new data models for accounting. I don't agree with other commenters that we should tread lightly in trying to decipher another field, nor do I agree with the view that the field of Accounting would have found a better way by now if there were one. Accountants are rarely, if ever, experts in CS or software engineering; likewise software developers rarely have depth in accounting.
Source: just my opinions. I've been running an accounting software startup for 5 years.