On Thursday, December 5, 2002, at 10:31 AM, Tim May wrote:

Swiss banks could take in and dispense from accounts without any identity credentials (the passwords and equivalents to signatures and chop marks) because of this basic point about Bayesian probability. Swiss banks were not trustworthy because they let customers examine their vaults, their computers (!), or who their owners were.

In rereading the first line here, I didn't mean to define identity credentials as passwords and equivalents to signatures and chop marks. Just the opposite.; Identity credentials are taken to be biometric ID, or is-a-person signed credentials, or other statements of legal and personal identy. The passport of Timothy C. May, for example. But a Swiss bank, pre-eunuch version, did not require passports or credentials issued by the Vichy Government or Pol Pot or whomever. This is what numbered accounts were all about. (Perhaps some did, and this was their "right" to operate as they wished.) The core point is that identity credentials of the is-a-person sort have nothing to do with banking and money in general. --Tim May