Re: e$: The Book-Entry/Certificate Distinction

>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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  and stevenw@iglou.com (Steven Weller)
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[certificates have their own inherent worth etc]

> 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?

There's no reason for the recipient to know it's from your credit card.
You simply obtain cash from your bank as a loan and then give it to
the recipient.

If you want to provide the convenience of CC (ie avoid having to go to
the ATM first), you could allow wallets to communicate with the bank
via the merchant's equipment, in effect building an ATM into every 
point-of-sale terminal.

wallet via merchant to bank: withdraw X from account Y
bank via merchant to wallet: here is X in e-cash
wallet to merchant: here is X in e-cash

If you do not wish the bank to know which merchant it was, you could send
it via an anonymizing service or two.

> Furthermore, how do we assess the value of real physical things in a system
> like this?

Well, same as in any other system: "how much are you willing to give me
for this?"

Jiri
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