In Cryptonomicon all the banks issue paper IOUs for Silver they claim to have. In order to keep each other honest that they really have the silver, just before closing time time Friday the banks would all run and demand exchange on every piece of their competitors paper they could get their hands on.
I'm looking at you ecash mints.
If you haven't read it...
It’s a tome! Haven’t read it in decades, but it’s still on my bookshelf after all those years. I think back to it all the time.
I started it for one day long ago but fell off for no good reason. Worth reading I gather
Indeed.
The author was following the work of the early cypherpunks closely enough that some have speculated he is Satoshi based on the timing and ideas of some of his writings.
Definitely dangerous ideas in his books.
I read a few of his books. For some reason, this one and reamde I didn't finish. Got a fair bit of the way into reamde too. Was decent but guess I was busy with irl junk at the time. Cryptonomicon and Neuromancer are the two sci-fi at top of current to-read list
Snow Crash was the first of his I read. It was my first exposure to the idea of memes and that they could be used as exploits against the human brain like a virus. Totally destroyed my worldview.
Thats the Suffolk system right?
That was part of the "free banking" system that the national banking act of 1860 nuked.
Uh, what? This is from a fiction book. It is sounding like there is a gap in my history knowledge that needs to be filled.
I mean, I've read the book, so I know what you're talking about, but this is an actual banking system that e-chash mints might be able to use.
The only flaw with the banking system as applied to e-cash ments would be that the Suffolk Bank was a central clearing house for smaller banks. And they had regular redemption demands to this centralized bank.
Feature, not a bug.
The annecdote is similar to modern repo markets. Except we have better collateral. Anything long term or large in size exits to L1.
