[wsfii-discuss] Cash and e-cash in community settings

Thu Oct 6 15:10:06 UTC 2005

Hoping to avoid a controversy that I accidently
started on another list, _not a million miles from
here_, but:

- Conventional cash is physical and anonymous tokens
- You can do this with (say) smart cards or some kind
of electronic tokens
- Cash can be issued by communities rather than banks
- Cash can probably be local, like the Lime (it'll
tend to smear though, IMO)
- There's no computerised audit trail for cash, it's
  pretty privacy preserving
- Some people and some complete communities want the
anonymity and privacy aspects of using cash
- They aren't necessarily (in the sense of a logically
necessary relation) doing 'bad' things (and there,
obviously there's a huge minefield of contrasting
moral values) and anyway who-am-i-to-judge.

Therefore I feel that:
a) There's a place for cash in the world, though it
probably won't look like notes, sooner or later
b) There's a place for cash community currencies

Just my 0.2 of an yet-to-be-defined currency. I'm glad
that there's a lot of vigorous discussion about this,
it's a subject that's fundamental to choices in
society, look at all the quotes in Josef's post and
who made 'em...

Best regards Hugh

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