Right...I think. What has to scale is the "semantics of money." Within a small area ("box"), security is guaranteed by how the enclosing system works, and over a larger area it's done by crypto There are several ways to make the boundary porous. 1. Differing rates of clearing a smaller system to a larger. I can clear to a larger system once an hour, once a day, once a month, etc. One can keep a risk bound steady in a system with increasing transaction flux simply by increasing the rate of clearing. 2. Probabilistic verification. In a system where verification is used, the transactions at the low end might be certified in real time at some rate. This decreases the cost of provision while keeping an eye out for the upper bound on risk. 3. Net settlement. A system where one can both add and subtract value can clear periodically only the net difference in funds. Net settlement works really well for small scale systems, but systemic risk increases proportional to system size. 4. Exposure caps. In a net settlement system, there might be a maximum positive or negative balance that would be permitted before clearing to another system was required. Futures markets have rules similar to this. 5. Intraperiod overdraft loans. A "daylight overdraft" is a running net negative balance in between clearing times. By charging for this money as a short term loan, there is an incentive to minimize its use. There are more, certainly, and any student of financial markets could name another five without too much thought. There are some interesting and significant issues involved in verification of some of these policies. Eric