At 3:54 AM -0400 5/5/07, Tyler Durden wrote:
Hopefully they read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and stashed big chunks of that gold overseas.
It's *all* overseas, "protected" by a giant clusterfuck of trusts,
corporations, lapsed and not, in various "friendly" jurisdictions all over
the place. The gold itself is sitting in the usual gold depositories in
London, and, I think, Dubai, and so on.
Obviously, when it comes to Uncle, it don't matter a whit where the stuff
they want is, if you're a US citizen, what's theirs is theirs and what's
yours is negotiable. The IRS owns more than a few taxpayers' ex-villas in
the sunshine around the world, for instance.
More to the point, the database servers, and the officers, and the owners,
of E-Gold are all in Melbourne, Florida. Game over.
Eric Hughes' fantasy of "regulatory arbitrage" was always that, a fantasy.
The law *anywhere* can change at the drop of a hat, and, ultimately, the
law is what the guys with guns say the law is. You can run, but you can't
hide, and, usually, you can't run either.
Tim May was right. Cryptography, not the law, is how to ultimately protect
financial assets from nation-states, no matter how benevolent they say they
are, or capricious they may be in fact.
And, like I've always said, financial crypto is the only crypto that matters.
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga