You, Dan Clore, wrote:

>> Money is made from something physical and exchanges hands,
>
>Not necessarily. Most money now is just data in computer banks. Money is
>now pure information.
True. The history of money is in the direction of increasing abstraction,
from cowrie shells to gold, to currency to bytes in a bank's computer.

Just as important, the types of money are proliferating. Mr. Veeder
thinks parties to a transaction can't create and exchange their own
personal money, but that's not true. There is a significant traffic in
instruments of short-term debt between corporations these days, which is
effectively money. What keeps it from being currency is that it's not
"legal tender for all debts public and private." No one can compel anyone
to accept a note from AT&T in satisfaction of a debt. Only payment of
currency always and everywhere accomplishes that.

----------------
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA

"The world makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is
identical with the discovery of the truth--that the error and truth are
simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to
when it has been cured of one error is usually simply another error, and
maybe one worse than the first one." -- H.L. Mencken