The Future of Private Money

by Sidd --Co-Founder of Pecunix --Co-creator of Voucher-Safe

Since the early 1990s forward thinkers have been Since around 330 BC in Ancient Egypt warehouse
discussing various technologies that could be receipts have been used as a form of money. Farmers
used for private money. With the arrival of strong deposited grains in secure warehouses and received
cryptography and the Internet, digital cash in the written receipts for specific quantities of grain. The
form of “Digital Bearer Certificates” became a real receipts could be returned and exchanged for the
possibility. In this article we will look at the history grain when needed. These receipts were much easier
behind the idea of bearer certificates and why it is to carry, store and exchange than bags of grain, so
more relevant today than ever before. they were used as a secure and convenient form
of payment. The warehouse receipt itself had no
The history of warehouse receipts as means of inherent value; it was only a symbol for something
exchange. of value. These highly successful ancient grain

DGC Magazine January 2011 Issue § 19

banks eventually evolved into the goldsmith banks paper was no longer backed up by real metal in a
in seventeenth century England. vault, but by the bankers’ promise to pay the bearer
the value on the note. It is obvious that these new
These were the early days of the mercantile bankers were being dishonest, and ultimately their
revolution when gold and silver coins were the fraud was revealed and the system collapsed.
common money. No banks existed in England at the
time so people stored their wealth with the leading The problems with the early goldsmith bankers were
goldsmiths of London, who already had stores of caused primarily by a lack of adequate financial
precious metal in secure private vaults. For each governance. What the goldsmiths lacked was a
deposit of precious metal, the goldsmiths issued system that would keep them honest and would
paper receipts certifying the quantity and purity of allow their customers to have reasonable certainty
the metal. Like the grain receipts, the goldsmiths’ that the warehouse receipts they were using truly
receipts soon began to circulate as a safe and were as valuable as claimed. If those early bankers
convenient form of money backed by the gold and had allowed or encouraged their customers to elect
silver in the vaults. These receipts represented a a trustworthy member of the community to act as an
promise by the goldsmith to exchange the receipt auditor of their affairs, the problem would not have
for a certain amount and quality of metal, and arisen. The auditor would simply examine and count
were “negotiable” in that anyone (the bearer of the all the precious metal in the vault, then examine the
receipt) could present the receipt to the goldsmith banker’s receipt book. It would be instantly obvious
and take possession of the metal. if there was a difference in the amount of reserve
and the value of the issued receipts. If the people
The system of goldsmith receipts worked who used the receipts for trade trusted the auditor
exceptionally well so the obvious question to ask they could always be confident that the receipts had
is why, if the warehouse receipt system worked so full value.
well, did it not continue to be used through to the
present? Unfortunately instead of implementing honest
auditing and keeping the money supply private, the
The decline government stepped in and started to regulate the
banking industry. This was the beginning of the end
With their warehouse receipts working extremely for anything remotely resembling honest money.
well as money, and earning a decent fee for storing Money has degenerated over the years to the
the precious metal, the goldsmiths became well point that it is highly dishonest and untrustworthy.
known and prosperous. It was not long before Bankers and governments do an extremely poor
people began asking the goldsmiths to lend them job of protecting the wealth of the people who
money. Merchants needed to expand, farmers trust them and the current runaway inflation and
wanted to buy more land, the borrowed money could financial breakdown is perfect evidence of this.
facilitate wealth and prosperity. The goldsmiths As we watch government money steadily decline
soon learned that they didn’t need to lend their own in value, we need to replace it with money of real
gold. They could simply write out more receipts to substantive value.
“create money”, even if they didn’t have the metal
in their vault to back them up. Nobody except the Warehouse receipts today
goldsmiths knew how much gold they had in their
vaults, or how many receipts they had issued. The In the early 1990s, Nick Szabo coined the term
receipts were still accepted at their full value, even “Digital Bearer Certificate” and described it as a
though in reality there was not enough gold to broad term incorporating various technologies. A
back them up. A subtle change had happened; the digital bearer certificate may come in various forms
goldsmiths had become bankers, and the papers they such as digital cash, digital warehouse receipt,
were issuing were no longer warehouse receipts, digital certificate of deposit, digital credit note,
but had become bankers’ notes (bank notes). The etc. Each of these forms may also come in various

DGC Magazine January 2011 Issue § 21

 forms: digital cash may be cryptographically and consequently do not appear to be resilient
blinded or not, it may be one-use only, it may have enough to survive. Bankers and governments don’t
cryptographic integrity or not, etc. “Cryptographic easily accept honest competition and these early
Warehouse Receipt” describes a specific type experiments have recently come under attack. Both
of digital bearer certificate which uses modern e-gold and Liberty Dollar have been charged by
technology to implement exactly the same idea the United States authorities with alleged offenses
as the goldsmiths’ receipts of old. Warehouse ranging from “money laundering”, unlicensed
receipts are an established principle still used in money transmitting and fraud.
modern society, most commonly for agricultural
and industrial trade, and have an established legal As the pioneer in online digital money, e-gold is
status. Most warehouse receipts are issued in an excellent case study that can help us develop
negotiable form so they can easily function as a private money into the future. Although e-gold
money substitute. models themselves as an issuer of digital gold
currency, their main function is more in the line
The technology is available to create a system of gold of an account based payment system. This means
or silver (or any commodity) warehouse receipts that they are able to control who uses their system
issued by an efficient and secure computerized and how their system is used, and the government
system under a policy of strong governance. Using expects them to do that. If we look at the Federal
modern highly secure cryptographic techniques and Reserve Bank (that issues US Dollars) we can see
combining this with the Internet, we can efficiently that they don’t have this problem. Once they have
facilitate both local and international exchanges printed the money and distributed it into the world,
between traders, merchants and their customers. they have absolutely no control on who uses the
money or how it is used. Consequently it would
If we use a computer to create the receipt, the be impractical to accuse the Federal Reserve
issuing warehouse can cryptographically “sign” Bank of facilitating crime and they can plausibly
the document to guarantee its authenticity. It isn’t deny knowledge of any alleged crime. In the case
possible for anyone to create counterfeit warehouse of e-gold, it is much easier for law-enforcement
receipts because they don’t have the signing key. agencies to accuse e-gold of facilitating crime than
The receipts can be digitally stored in a database it is for them to find and charge the real criminals,
or as text files, and can be passed from person to as they must do if Federal Reserve notes are used.
person using Internet facilities such as e-mail and
instant messaging. As long as there is always a Furthermore, e-gold has no way to plausibly deny
strong governance system in place, people who use any knowledge of the alleged crime because they
these warehouse receipts can be confident that the have complete records of every e-gold transaction.
receipt has real value. The introduction of cryptographic warehouse
receipts would put the issuer in the same position
After the historical success and failure of warehouse as the Federal Reserve Bank in terms of plausible
receipts, it is reasonable to ask what relevance deniability and could protect the issuer from
they have today. Right now we are experiencing frivolous attacks by lazy law-enforcement agencies.
a serious crisis in the fraudulent money system Clearly the current political and legislation regime
currently run by bankers in collusion with corrupt in the world does not encourage private currencies
governments and we need to create a practical and in the way they have been implemented to date so
honest alternative. During the last 15 years we innovators need to come up with new systems to
have seen various experiments in private money challenge the status quo.
issuance based on gold, with the most successful
being e-gold, the Liberty Dollar and various clones Research indicates that there is a distinct change in
of e-gold such as GoldMoney and Pecunix. These human consciousness rapidly spreading throughout
private money systems have served their purpose the world. Perhaps it is due to the facilitation of
well as experiments, but unfortunately have flaws massive and instant information exchange through

22 § DGC Magazine January 2011 Issue

the Internet, but no matter what facilitates
this process of change, people are waking
up to the realities of life under corrupt, Recent Loom
violent controlling governments. The
world is ready for honest money that
puts the economic power back into the
Updates
hands of the people who produce, and Sat 2010-12-18 :
forces governments to work as they Concurrent Reads and Writes
should. The issue of gold based money
in the form of warehouse receipts suits Getting rid of the GNU database, which uses a central
this new paradigm perfectly. lock, and switching to the use of individual files for all data
storage. I am very close to releasing this now. This will allow
Payments between people, merchants massive parallelism on a very busy server, with thousands of
and customers using well governed processes all doing their own thing without having to wait
cryptographic warehouse receipts are their turn to use a database. The approach I use is commonly
secure, private and highly resistant to known as “optimistic concurrency.”
government interference. The larger
the number of independent private Much of the code remains unchanged, still using simple
money issuers, the more resilient the naive “put” and “get” operations. But now these are layered
system will become. Today we have on top of a transactional buffer which, when all is said and
the ideal situation to use this type of done, calls the Loom::File::update routine to do a safe,
private money for worldwide trade. reliable, atomic commit. If the commit fails, the original
We have extremely efficient computer HTTP query is run again from scratch as if nothing happened.
and Inter-network systems and modern This continues until the commit succeeds, which the laws of
highly secure cryptographic techniques. probability guarantee will eventually happen. All of this is
It’s time for people to take back the transparent to the core logic of the server.
control of their wealth and money, and
one way to ensure this is for them to In this new version, when we charge or refund usage tokens,
return to the system that stood the test we don’t bother moving them to or from the usage token
of time (approximately 2500 years). issuer location anymore. That would become a point of
Using precious metals, gold and contention in a busy system, with many processes trying to
silver as money, combined with the update the single issuer location, causing many retries due to
efficiency, security and privacy offered commit failures, and becoming a performance bottleneck.
by cryptographic warehouse receipts is
a viable solution for honest worldwide As a result of this policy, we must relax the normal
commerce in the future. constraint which demands that at all times, the sum of the
balances at all locations must equal -1. This is no longer
Reference: true of asset type zero (usage tokens).
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_
evolution_of_money
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknote Sat 2011-01-01 :
3 http://szabo.best.vwh.net/bearer_contracts. Concurrent Reads and Writes Now Done
html
4 http://anoncvs.aldigital.co.uk/lucre/theory2.
pdf Loom uses only the file system for data storage now, with
5 https://ffij33ewbnoeqnup.onion.meshmx. no central locks and no GNU DB. The source code for this
com/doc.php new Version 103 is available here: https://loom.cc/
6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warehouse_
receipt

DGC Magazine January 2011 Issue § 23