-- On 12 Dec 2003 at 19:06, Tim May wrote:
Your notion that "a gold atom cannot be distinguished from another" has anything important to do with issues at the crypto and traceability layers is symptomatic of this delusion.
It has nothing to do with crypto, but a great deal to do with traceability.
When a person deposits $10,000 and then writes a check to another person, or wires money, or withdraws cash, and so and so forth, do you think some record of the serial numbers was the means by which this transaction was traced?
Usually the transfer of value ultimately results in an adjustment in the ledgers of the federal reserve -- the receiving bank goes up slightly, the sending bank goes down slightly, and the traceability follows from the fact that the transaction ultimately goes through the federal reserve. The FRN numbers are a backup system to trace people and banks who try to bypass this. A gold transfer does not go through the federal reserve.
Your foolish faith that "E-gold" is some significant step "because gold atoms look like all other gold atoms, because there is only one stable isotope of gold" is embematic of the delusions which the gold bugs and offshore platform silly people have.
I can rather easily open a pecunix account with a hotmail address. Opening a swiss bank account is considerably harder. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG RbQNKTbJxJRsjesXiXUdfxhkzsujCH/JFKjO3gzH 4xkPkjIloRW2PyFGweps7t3gno3ljOkFGy0RuSOC4