From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
To: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb+limbo@nsb.fv.com>
Message Hash: 2ad498de425a430f759d0379565c9a571d08b0909374942a463c5d3259cc88c7
Message ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951206104553.24528A-100000@eskimo.com>
Reply To: <wklMcgyMc50eEbskld@nsb.fv.com>
UTC Datetime: 1995-12-06 19:44:11 UTC
Raw Date: Wed, 6 Dec 95 11:44:11 PST
From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 95 11:44:11 PST
To: Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb+limbo@nsb.fv.com>
Subject: Re: Geodesic Payment Systems? (was Re: Meeting notes from ANSI X.9 Meeting on Electronic Payment)
In-Reply-To: <wklMcgyMc50eEbskld@nsb.fv.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.951206104553.24528A-100000@eskimo.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
On Wed, 6 Dec 1995, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:
> I had assumed that there was a market discount, but it's still not quite
> that simple. It's very hard for markets to deal with *unbounded* risk.
> The biggest problem I see with most of the crypto-cash schemes is that
> there is a legitimate scenario -- however low-probability you might
> assess it to be -- of break-the-bank catastrophic failure, i.e. in which
> someone gains the keys that allow him to essentially print money. This
> kind of low-probability, infinite-cost risk is the kind of thing that
> gives underwriters the heebie jeebies. There's a good reason that most
> companies have "Ltd" after their name instead of "Unlimited", in those
> countries where that's the naming convention.
I find this argument totally unconvincing. No risk is unbounded. The
worst thing that can possibly happen is that a nearby star goes supernova
and completely destroys the earth. Yet markets handle this
low-probability risk quite well.
The direct cost of a break-the-bank catastrophic failure is bounded by the
amount of capital the bank has. This is because the market will not
accept more liabilities (real or forged) from the bank than its capital.
There may be other indirect costs resulting from dislocations, but these
should also be proportional to the size of the bank. Therefore your
argument is really against centralization and for diversification and
distribution.
Wei Dai
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