-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 1:19 AM -0700 on 5/12/02, Morlock Elloi wrote:
>> Oh, but it's not. Try to carry around a good merchant's daily >> receipts in cash every day, see how much you end up paying for >> guys in armored cars instead. > > Wrong analogy. I don't care about 1:M (merchants), they are visible > and therefore do not need cash in the first place. The issue here > is 1:1. Think about what you just said, there. Don't you realize that 1:M *always* starts 1:1? It's the same kind of "evil-bourgeois-businessman" hierarchical command-economy argument that aristocrats and peasants throw around. It's amazing how this kind of non-market mentality pervades even the most supposedly anarchist circles. More to the point, you don't *live* unless you're selling something, and the more you sell, the better you live. Thus, the seller's transaction cost, 1:1, or 1:M, or whatever, is all that matters. All "Ms" start out as "1s", in other words. That was Coase's point, by the way. Transaction cost is everything. You control the lowest transaction cost, and you dictate what happens. If anonymous payments are cheaper, for the seller of a given good or service, and there's reason to believe this, we'll have anonymous payments, sooner or later. >> If we really could reduce risk-adjusted transaction cost by, say, >> three orders of magnitude or more over a credit card by using > > Multitudes of mail servers are having dejavu ... Doesn't make it any less true. I do admit to being a bit blue in the face for repeating myself to various invincible idiots all the time, though. :-). Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 7.5 iQA/AwUBPN6kFcPxH8jf3ohaEQLbawCgkKRNhW1VwwqwUDZTff2Q4epSNvAAn3R8 KfdL2fr4vmj6NbOVMgSzYNSP =Tnwc -----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'
