On Saturday, March 30, 2002, at 10:09 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Even if e-gold had no anonymity and pseudonymity capabilities, it > is still a necessary infrastructure to support real e-cash, as > there is no other internet medium that supports reasonably > irrevocable and instant payments.
My contention is that physical gold sitting in a warehouse in, say, the Bank of Bermuda, is no different from a stack of $20 bills sitting in that same bank. Both are stores of value to some people. Arguing that gold is intrinsically more valuable than Federal Reserve Notes is not useful in this particular debate. Furthermore, if that pile of gold or stack of FRNs is used to then transfer some other store of value at some remote site, who cares what form it was once in? > But, in fact, it does have some limited anonymity and pseudonymity > capabilities > > e-gold does not provide an anonymization mechanism, unlike Chaum's > e-cash. But it does allow money that has been anonymized or > pseudonymized in real space to then be moved electronically. No more so than "dollars" are moved electronically. When a bank moves trillions around via SWIFT, it is of course not moving dollars. It's just changing marks in a book. So, too, with gold or platinum or Yap stones. Without physical delivery, who cares about actual form? (Yeah, the issue of gold vs. FRNs is an interesting one, but it's orthogonal to the issue of warehouse receipts.) > Let us suppose that someone takes his physical bag of gold, and > opens an account. How can they connect the identity owning that > account, to that person's other identities. The same is true of FRNs carried to a bank and deposited. (Yes, I know that such deposits would be nearly impossible to make in the U.S. or in many other countries. Ditto for gold, too. If the claim is that once dollars have been converted to gold in an offshore bank then the offshore funds can be moved more freely, this is so. But the same applies to dollars converted to dollars or marks or francs in an offshore bank. The actual _form_ of the money, whether in gold or platinum or marks or dollars, is not even of _secondary_ importance.) > Alternatively, suppose someone goes to a cypherpunk meeting, and > buys some e-gold from someone else at the cypherpunk meeting, use > ordinary dollars and the sellers web enabled cell phone. He now > has an electronic medium of exchange that can only be traced to > those ordinary dollars. The _form_ of the money is not important. Only the trust that delivery will happen (belief about the future behavior of actors). There is nothing "magic" (pun intended) about the putative denomination having the word "gold" in it. Your points about untraceability would apply just as well if the units were nominally in "dollars." > ...Absolutely true, but e-cash does need an underlying thing of > value. At present interfacing to federal reserve notes is being > made more and more difficult. The crackdown on money movements apply to all forms of money, in all currencies or objects of value. I've seen no convincing arguments from the E-gold enthusiasts that E-gold is anything more than "magical thinking." --Tim May "Dogs can't conceive of a group of cats without an alpha cat." --David Honig, on the Cypherpunks list, 2001-11
