Our mechanisms for estimating credibility of a guarantor partly assume that life can be made difficult for the guarantor if they renege. Those intuitions are often completely wrong if the guarantor is anonymous. That's the main point of what I was saying. 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. My understanding of the history of banking is that there are ZERO documented cases of runs on banks before the gov't started mucking with the banking industry. They started that mucking based on some economists projection that such a run could happen, so the gov't had to protect the pipul from it. 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 ... It also has strong arguments for free banking, which is consequence of cryptographic electronic banking. dean