At 15:18 +1100 7/12/17, Kim Holburn wrote: >That's cash, but most of our money is not at home or on our persons as actual >cash, it is in a bank as bits on a banking computer or held in some other >assets. There is not a one-to-one correspondence between actual physical cash >and bits of money in the bank. Which is probably less safe than bitcoin or >stone money from then island of Yap.
Agreed, deposits with financial institutions (including trustworthy Uncle Fred) are a different story entirely from physical cash. A ledger is a record of provenance of the current balance in an account. Digitisation (as in 'rendering as binary digits') caused very little change in such schemes, because the data had long been expressed as decimal numbers on a physical ledger-card. For their own protection, banks keep ledgers for an extended period. (If they didn't, they'd have trouble getting money back from spendthrift young women who rush out and spend a lazy $3mill that gets erroneously credited to their account [loose rendition of a court-case this week]). And, of course, law enforcement agencies have muscled in on the act, and imposed 'data retention' provisions on deposit-taking institutions, so that the ledger entries are available for more purposes than just audit of the accuracy of balances, and correction of errors. -- Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/ Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 2 6288 6916 http://about.me/roger.clarke mailto:[email protected] http://www.xamax.com.au/ Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law University of N.S.W. Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
