expiring bearer documents

[R. A. Hettinga]

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At 10:14 AM -0800 3/26/04, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
>The point is that the asset (a performance) which the
>bearer-document (ticket) grants access to expires.  I think that's
>actually orthogonal to the
>ticket itself expiring.

Okay. The inverse, maybe.


>Another example with a more gradual loss of value
>might be a bearer document for a certain amount
>of short half-life radioactive substance.   Or just the
>substance --no documents, just assets-- though that's
>less portable than gold for health reasons.
>
>I suppose that some foodstuffs also show halflives.

Or CMO tranches, which decline variously in interest income as the
underlying mortgage principal is paid off -- or pre-paid, in a
falling interest environment.

Maybe you're talking about a derivative then. In that case, what
you're doing is making a contingent claim on an asset based on an
authenticated data stream. The first crypto protocol I ever saw that
does this is Jeuls and Jakobssen's fairly misnamed "X-Cash".
Essentially you want to decrypt some code at the right time and run
it, executing a transaction.

>And, like a 10 year treasury note, appreciate with age.

Isn't that the opposite of what you just said?

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'