-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- At 10:34 PM -0700 on 5/13/02, Richard Fiero wrote:
> Um, that $4 trillion didn't move around in trucks speeding on > highways. It's just a bunch of marks on hard drives and very > little money actually changed owners. Already electronic. > Already secure. Extremely mobile. Correct. And it can only be transferred, in very big chunks, from one bank to another, taking at least 24 hours to clear and settle because of still mostly batch-processed bookeeping applications. The stuff we're talking about is much more mobile, it clears instantly, and considerably less expensive, so that ordinary people with an internet connection, and eventually ordinary machines, can pay each other increasingly smaller and smaller amounts as technology evolves. > As the article excerpted below states, in 2001 there was about > $620 billion dollars in US currency out there somewhere and 65% > was in $100 dollar bills. Sure. I've read Rogoff, and Doyle, who he cites, before. Rogoff says nothing new there that everyone in the money business doesn't say already -- and the Bank for International Settlement has much better data, by the way. http://www.bis.org/cpss/cpsspubl.htm is a good place to start. The Kansas City Fed also has a good database, called FRED :-), containing all the various monetary aggregate figures in it going back at least to the turn of the 20th century. *My* point is that there hasn't been implementation of a working bearer-settled internet transaction system yet. I would probably claim that that when it's up and running, and proven to be cheap enough, that the amount of cash in circulation of various national currencies will easily double in 5 years, and go up from there. I also expect that, if it's cheap enough, internet bearer transactions will almost completely replace book-entry settled payment and finance within 25 years. Or at least to the same ratio that book-entry transactions dominate physical delivery of paper bearer instruments today, which, as inadvertently noted above, is pocket lint. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQEVAwUBPOEfaMUCGwxmWcHhAQF/4wgAtejiMUjA/QnTBqQKDUOxFDT0RsrjVjHb o79rKABKXuW49BL25LSTVpmQFzWUOKdG1Xte/DXDP2IREdPlDphmVvXl/7FnXhoj 4/tWaYSYteqsbA0O3oef5d4vmYDfR6HDzas/nHM3k5S7Nxb2w41bSmaUbkcmFO9W b0muJF1hxdf2Rd5/u7hDccbJJl+OUvjcR6mxW5qlbYlllFDAVAWwpZvIh8/qSpO6 IiCwPdeibbBHI6ixVy28Mo5sMet0XtkHen1FE2Li8jCW+PA+3cu7nxKYjWwXuc/U 9ZJs/x1ugdrmSlwt23s2PLknOcoxEEvRcQF2yoSOtvOwxJg/5J7SUg== =ScL3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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'
