corporate vs. state

[R. A. Hettinga]

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At 8:59 PM -0500 3/25/04, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
>Boom. An anonymously-voted limited liability business entity.
>
>Look, ma. No state.

Oh. One more thing.

It'll *never* happen until the risk-adjusted (those nasty latin words
ceterus paribus) cost of doing so is *significantly* cheaper than
doing so with lawyers, legislatures and a monopoly composed of lots
of guys with guns.

Fine. Make it cheaper. Moore's Law creates geodesic networks, so
let's have geodesic internet bearer transactions.

I always throw around "three orders of magnitude" (divide the cost by
a thousand, for you philosophy majors out there :-)) as a WAG. It's
the price-point where I would wager that if functionally anonymous
bearer transactions were that cheap, for the same level of risk, that
book-entry transactions would go the way of the intaglio bearer bond,
armored transport of same, and clearing house vaults as a percentage
of modern total transactions by transaction count and dollar volume.

Cheers,
RAH

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-- 
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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'