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Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1994-08-22 - Re: e$ as “travellers check?

Header Data

From: “Perry E. Metzger” <perry@imsi.com>
To: Jonathan Rochkind <jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu>
Message Hash: ee6504ae3dafb3509e4f1c9459527f90ad99552fe86a161496ebc8655b2ebd24
Message ID: <9408221245.AA00663@snark.imsi.com>
Reply To: <199408211805.OAA25259@cs.oberlin.edu>
UTC Datetime: 1994-08-22 12:46:54 UTC
Raw Date: Mon, 22 Aug 94 05:46:54 PDT

Raw message

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 94 05:46:54 PDT
To: Jonathan Rochkind <jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu>
Subject: Re: e$ as "travellers check?
In-Reply-To: <199408211805.OAA25259@cs.oberlin.edu>
Message-ID: <9408221245.AA00663@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Jonathan Rochkind says:
> But someone a long time ago brought up traveller's checks, and the similarity
> between them and ecash. The similarity seems pretty darn close to me. 

Travellers checks are not anonymous.

What people basically don't seem to understand here is that the
government is now run administratively and not legislatively. Congress
ceeded huge amounts of power to regulators, who have enormous
latitude. They can decide arbitrarily to accept or reject various
proposals based entirely on their whim.

Their whim, for the past few decades, has been to reduce as much as
possible the capacity to engage in untraceable transactions. Because
of that, any bank proposing to improve the capacity to produce such
transactions is going to get into trouble with the regulators, who are
acting to try to lessen such capacities. It really doesn't matter what
the details of existing law are.

Perry

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