-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 10:31 AM -0800 on 12/5/02, Tim May wrote:
> [At least 4-5 of Hettinga's e$/digibucks/qwatloos chat lists elided > from this distribution....instead of creating so many lists, ... > well, it's obvious what the "instead of" ought to be.] :-). There is no universal mailing list, of course. People on other lists do other things besides the things that people on this list do. When those things intersect, threads get cross-posted. Life's a bitch and then you crosspost. Whining about it won't stop it, and, frankly, it's better that way. About the other stuff, and as always, yeah, what Tim said. Money (currency, whatever) is, by definition, something that is more convertible into other things than anything else: salt, gold, pieces of flint you can trade for a finished hand axe, whatever. Money is, for lack of a better way of describing it, the most universal commodity. Currently, national numeraires, units of account, representing promises to pay and be paid, issued by fiat and force of arms of various geographic force monopolies, are the most universal commodities these days. Again, life's a bitch, but there it is. Sooner or later, in order to buy something, you're going to use a national numeraire, so your "currency" should be easily convertible into that numeraire. In fact, it will be more popular if it's *denominated* in that numeraire, these days. So to review, money is fungible, one unit is the same as another, and, like I just said, completely exchangeable. Finally, "bearer" means that *anyone* can own something if they earn or pay for it, and that their identity is immaterial to that ownership. That usually implies instantaneous clearing, execution and settlement, and, on the net, that implies (as Tim and others discovered more than 15 years ago, and have been discussing on this list for more than a decade) various financial cryptography protocols, the first of which was David Chaum's blind signatures. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 (Build 349) Beta iQA/AwUBPe+sD8PxH8jf3ohaEQLtCACffAU/81D6hAoLWMTzjm/Htuzae40An0tA 5Z0dM28BZ/B0BeVRIgnX1lXM =E97x -----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'
