At 2:30 AM 8/22/95, Timothy C. May wrote:

...

(An important point is that in a cash economy, identity is almost irrelevant. It's only in non-cash, or "account-based," economy that True Names are demanded. Lots of interesting issues to discuss here, which I won't now.)

[Lots of interesting discussion deleted]

Everyone trusts their transactions because of the difficulty of forging certificates. That means that once again, a certificate has it's own inherent worth. It speaks for itself, and when it changes hands, the trade is, as Eric Hughes says, "immediately and finally" cleared and settled. The overhead of keeping books is gone, at least for the trading parties, and especially for the clearing houses, who, like exchanges, just kind of disappear, along with any way to regulate them. Somewhere, Joe Kennedy, the first Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Comission, is probably either crying his eyes out or laughing his head off, depending on your interpretation of his role in regulatory history.

In such a system, where does credit come in? If I have a certificate that is worth X, then does the recipient know that it's from my "credit card"? How do I obtain credit, and in what form does it exist? Furthermore, how do we assess the value of real physical things in a system like this? -- Steven Weller <Windsor Consulting Group> +1 502 454 0054 (voice) OS-9 Consultancy and Software +1 502 451 5935 (fax) Finger for public key 00 02 3C 2F 83 76 D3 77 2A 95 E8 90 94 9A 9D 74 http://iglou.com/windsorgrp stevenw@iglou.com or realtime@well.sf.ca.us