Your source code, for sale

[Ian Grigg]

> Enzo Michelangeli writes:
>> In the world of international trade, where mutual distrust between buyer
>> and seller is often the rule and there is no central authority to
>> enforce
>> the law, this is traditionally achieved by interposing not less than
>> three
>> trusted third parties: the shipping line, the opening bank and the
>> negotiating bank.
>
> Interesting.  In the e-gold case, both parties have the same bank,
> e-gold ltd.  The corresponding protocol would be for the buyer to instruct
> e-gold to set aside some money which would go to the seller once the
> seller supplied a certain receipt.  That receipt would be an email return
> receipt showing that the seller had sent the buyer the content with hash
> so-and-so, using a cryptographic email return-receipt protocol.

This is to mix up banking and payment systems.  Enzo's
description shows banks doing banking - lending money
on paper that eventually pays a rate of return.  In
contrast, in the DGC or digital gold currency world,
the issuers of gold like e-gold are payment systems and
not banks.  The distinction is that a payment system
does not issue credit.

So, in the e-gold scenario, there would need to be
similar third parties independent of the payment system
to provide the credit moving in the reverse direction to
the goods.  In the end it would be much like Enzo's
example, with a third party with the seller, a third
party with the buyer, and one or two third parties who
are dealing the physical goods.  There have been some
thoughts in the direction of credit creation in the
gold community, but nothing of any sustainability has
occurred as yet.

iang