On the 15th of September, Tim May wrote - . . .

"Digital money" currently has only a few ways of dealing with transfers of value in transactions. A lot of the problems come, in my view, from this relatively spartan set of "primitives."

Where are the cryptographic equivalents of:

- money orders

- promissary notes

- receipts

- warrants

- lockboxes

- bearer bonds

- options

- time deposits

- coupons

- escrow

- IOUs

- zero coupon bonds

- checks

...and so on. The terms in any good dictionary of financial terms (such as the "MIT Dictionary of Modern Economics," ed. by David Pearce, 1992). (Many of these things are built up out of more basic things, with mix-ins from other classses, or with modified methods.)

A look at any book on money and finance shows a rich "microworld" of "things" and "procedures" (classes and methods attached to classes). The classes have subclasses, and the methods have various behaviors and "expectations" attached (more than just simple class behavior, more of an AI or agent flavor, in my view).

. . . .

--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."

Maybe I'm missing the larger point, but isn't it accurate that in the digital world, one protocol or procedure may take the place of perhaps several of the 'real-world' procedures or protocols? An effective mechanism of signing with non-repudiation that was recognized as binding on the signer would permit 'checks', 'promissory notes', 'IOUs', and 'warrants'. Some of the other species listed in your post aren't really money, anyway. They are things you can buy with money, like stock certificates or Maseratis. One could conceivably buy convertible debentures with e-cash, the same as one could buy them with 'real money', but it doesn't follow that there should be some one-to-one mapping of real money objects and classes onto electronic analogues. Once again, i've probably missed the forest, but a couple of the trees distracted me. --PJ Ponder