Re: (eternity) eternity issues (Re: Occam's Razor, DC-Nets, andEternity-Based Assassination Servers)

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 4:54 AM -0400 on 4/18/99, Adam Back wrote:


> Shutting down the ecash system or forcing identity escrow would be
> relatively easy also.

I don't know about shutting it down. Economic necessity is pretty powerful
stuff, and I think there's an economic necessity for digital bearer
transaction settlement; lower the cost of a transaction by 3 orders of
magnitude and all the accountant's materiality bells go off :-).

As to identity escrow, I think that everwhere a bearer transaction system
plugs into a book-entry system, identity is going to be required. You can't
put money into a bank account anonymously, that's the definition of the
beast in a world where money currently means debits and credits on a wire.

Cheers,
RAH
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.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'