Jonathan Rochkind says:
But someone a long time ago brought up traveller's checks, and the similarity between them and ecash. The similarity seems pretty darn close to me.
Travellers checks are not anonymous. What people basically don't seem to understand here is that the government is now run administratively and not legislatively. Congress ceeded huge amounts of power to regulators, who have enormous latitude. They can decide arbitrarily to accept or reject various proposals based entirely on their whim. Their whim, for the past few decades, has been to reduce as much as possible the capacity to engage in untraceable transactions. Because of that, any bank proposing to improve the capacity to produce such transactions is going to get into trouble with the regulators, who are acting to try to lessen such capacities. It really doesn't matter what the details of existing law are. Perry