"If the operators of an escrow service are anonymous, then either their accessible assets had better be enough that you can recover losses if they walk with your goods, or their opportunity cost of defecting on their clients had better be high enough (in terms of lost revenue, lost opportunity on outstanding customer goodwill, name recognition, channels, etc.) that they are sufficiently unlikely to that you will take the risk." It seems to me that there are many parallels between this state of affairs and that which prevailed in the American West of the 1800s, with respect to banking .... there were no agencies insuring deposits, and only the rep- -utation of the bank's president - usually a leader of the community - was guarantee upon the funds. Bank robberies were not uncommon, depositors were few, runs on the bank, I speculate, may not have been unknown in those cir- -cumstances where the community of bank depositors lost confidence in the bank or its officers. Another parallel which occurs to me is that of the computerized trading that occurred when programs controlled trading in, um, was it October of 1987 that the stock market shuddered ? 1989 ? ... it suggests the inevitability of software shuttling funds around at cyberspace speeds to take advantage of ebbs and flows in the economic tides of the human race, around the world ... It would be interesting to further study the origins of banking, as I expect such a study would provide many such parallels by which the case for digi- -tized banking could be made stronger ... -- richard