At 10:51 AM 12/9/04 -0500, R.A. Hettinga wrote:

cash payments of $50 to $100 per tip. The people add that a separate internal probe found that four employees of Mellon Financial Corp. had received Pittsburgh Pirates tickets, $50 American Express gift certificates and boxes of steaks for such data.

Just for the newbies, these are all bearer instruments, in RAHspeak. Bearer instruments (incl. gold, tobacco, whiskey, goats, etc.) let you do things that you don't want monitored. They also have 'finders keepers' property, which is a corollary, and a bug (not a feature) should you lose your wallet/stash. This is a hard property to imbue digicash with because you need to prevent double-spending, which generally requires some kind of online access, also a feature. (Think gas station in the boonies without a credit card terminal; only cash, gold, silver, Pu, etc if the vendor believes he is competent to verify those precious elements, etc.)