CDR: Re: Amex supports CARNIVORE enabled Anonymity System

[R. A. Hettinga]

At 9:39 PM -0400 on 9/18/00, R. A. Hettinga wrote:


> Someday, of course, you won't need the fiat bit, but pure commodities
> aren't the end-state. You probably need a mix of stuff, including financial
> proxies like debt and equity indices, and so on. But the core problem is
> measuring inflation. Fortunately, :-), Paul Harrison and I have this giant
> rant in the can about non-state bearer synthetic numeraires, using things
> like digital bearer warehouse receipts for the hard stuff, a proxy for the
> CPI...

By the way, the above isn't necessarily the end state, either.

A lot of people, probably me among them, subscribe to the theory advanced
by Eugene Fama (Efficient Market Hypothesis) and Fisher Black
(Black-Scholes option pricing formula) that if switching out of the
numeraire is cheap enough (insert Moore's Law here), it's probably better
to keep and price transactions in *appreciating* assets instead of assets
which don't earn a return.

Cheers,
RAH
-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'