[12960] in Cypherpunks
Re: Digital Cash
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga, Shipwright Develo)
Tue May 3 15:41:04 1994
Date: Tue, 3 May 1994 15:36:03 -0500
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
From: rah@TIAC.net (Robert Hettinga, Shipwright Development Corp.)
>>Anybody else out there with less draconian advantages to digital cash?
>
>Immediate and final clearing.
>
>Eric
I think I see that... If your accounting systems were tightly coupled
enough, (and you were completely cash based) you could get your pro formas
on 12:01 am the day after the quarter ended. Of course you wouldn't have a
chance to back-pedal the results so well, either. .
Your comment about clearing reminds me of something else, though. I know
that options are settled much faster (Next-day, if I remember. It's been
too long since I was in a cage.) than equity and fixed-income (5 days)
securities.
Is it possible to see instantaneous settlement happen in the financial
markets with digital cash? I keep remembering that Edison made his first
real pile by inventing the stock ticker, though I'm not sure how
crypto-anarchist libertarians (syntax-error?) would make theirs here. ;-)
OTOH, would "immediate and final clearing" in a peer-to-peer clearing
mechanism be a useful enough benefit that a market's participants would pay
to use it?
-Bob Hettinga
-----------------
Robert Hettinga "There is no difference between someone
Shipwright Development Corporation eats too little and sees Heaven and
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