On the 18th, Tim May wrote:
I wasn't saying they are all on the same footing, or are all separate and compartmentalizable things. Clearly some of them are just slightly different "flavors" of other things. I listed a bunch of them not as a taxonomy or ontology, but as an illustration that there are many kinds of financial dealings, many kinds of roles played.
That the real world has so many flavors of financial things could of course be due to inertia and ignorance, partly. But there are also different functionalities, and costs. Fitting the different needs, the different roles of the players. I won't go on and on, as my last post on this I think hit the main points, but consider how many flavors we have just of "checks": the "ordinary" checks we write, counter checks, dual-endorser checks, traveller's checks, and so on. (If you are arguing that only "digital cash" is a real issue, and all other constructs are "small matters of programming," then we disagree profoundly.)
My mistake then. You obviously have in mind some things much more subtle and more logically removed from money, or currency, or even liquidity than what I thought you were referring to. I'm going back to reading the list in the mornings. --PJ . . . .
--Tim May
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."