The internet looks like it is slowly moving towards anonymous micropayments for services, and metering for scarce resources. One presumes that in 10-15 years time frame such payments will be pervasive. In such an environment where you can buy bandwidth per Mb at your chosen bit-rate for anonymous ecash, and buy storage per Mb/year, and CPU time per MIPs/year there will be a large amount of readily marketable resources. That is to say high velocity efficient markets will arise for resale of bandwidth, storage and CPU hours. The interesting question then is can we actually base an entirely net based currency on trading of these resources. What would the architecture for such a payment system look like? Design goals would be that it should be: - a distributed system - not involve trusted banks - be immediately exchangeable for any currency - be outside the influence of governments and banks - be immune to government hidden taxations such as printing new money as a form of tax - be immune from government taxation - be a stable form of cash (in the face of rapidly depreciating assets like Mb/years of storage as mass storage devices continue their price plumet.) Possible? Then I can have some net cash savings backed by the rights to 1Tb of bandwidth at 100 Mb/sec. 100 Mb/sec for 3 days. A problem with this is that the market prices of the assets is continually dropping. How do I hedge against this. Can I buy futures? Sell 100 Mb/sec for 3 days now in exchange for 200 Mb/sec for 3 days in 1 years time at an predicted equivalent value? Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`