e$: The Book-Entry/Certificate Distinction

[Steven Weller]

>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?


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