gnu@toad.com says:
I wonder if anonymous digital cash will really consist of shares in frozen orange juice futures... [quotes article from Risks]
The article in Risks was largely bullshit. In the real world, you can't predict futures prices well enough to do what he proposed. The person who wrote it has obviously heard rumors but never got enough details and never figured it out on his own. He's obviously never actually thought about the real problem -- in practice you can never predict which ticket will win -- if you could you'd become a billionare in the futures markets. The way people tend to do this sort of thing in reality is that they find a friendly broker who'll write a pair of tickets and then switch them if necessary. In practice, this is traceable if anyone investigates. This used to be a trick often practiced to move money into a tax-deferred retirement account -- one would write two tickets, and take the loss against one's personal account and the gain against one's personal pension fund. This scheme was also used to defer capital gains near a year end by creating an offsetting loss -- write two tickets, sell the loser (so you can claim the loss) and then wait to sell the winner for a few weeks until the New Year has come. The IRS finally caught on and people stopped doing it. Coincidently, this sort of scheme was at its height in the late '70s -- precisely the time it was used by Tyson to bribe Hillary Clinton. Perry