You make the transfer of information twofold. Your bankcard carries a record of its account balance along with you. As you conduct business from one world to the next your bankcard is updated. And records of these transactions get sent back to your bank along the mail route (traders can carry mail too) to your bank.
In the interest of saving time, this is how I do it: www.dedzone.net/traveller/rules/money.html
How does the bank get in touch with you? You set up mailboxes on the worlds you frequent the most so that the bank can send updated transactions while you're out and about. When you arrive at a starport, your bankcard checks your mail for bank statements and updates itself with these new transactions.
\_/
DED
--- In , DEREK STANLEY wrote:
>
> I'm not talking about hijacking an xboat. The xboat network is a web, we can assume that there are a number of xboats at every hub but probably not enough to hit every star within J 6 every day of the year. This you're going to end up with lag between systems within J6 that could end up being days or even weeks.
>
> What I'm talking about is exploiting the hole in the web created by prioritizing routes.
>
> Derek Stanley
> Sent from my iPhone...
>
> I had pondered this but what occurs when you run out of cash? Your
> brick and mortar is 2 months away how do you get more cash on the
> stick? (Lets pretend you're a free trader on razor thin margins so
> you haven't had anything beyond 3 hots and a cot for a long time.
> How does you employer put money on the stick? Because putting it in
> a bank thats 2 months away makes no sense.
> If we assume that financial records are transferred around via the
> xboat whats to stop a less than scrupulous crew from figuring out the
> xboat web and pulling the same cash out of an institution, turning it
> into liquid assets like gold, and then with drawing the same cash in
> 3 or 4 other star systems before the records can be updated?
> The accounting has to be a nightmare.
Only really workable method is to use what got used on Earth when we
had that sort of comm lag.
You either carry cash, or you use "letters of credit".
Cash can include the equivalent of traveller's cheques.
Letters of credit are a document (probably at least somewhat
electronic in the 3I) issued by a bank *to* another bank.
You get one from a nank. When you arrive at your destonation, you go
to another bank (possibly one specified by the originating bank)
which will validate the LOC *and* your ID.
If they check out, you get cash or open a local account. If they
don't you get held for the authorities.
Before you leave the planet, you get another LOC containing your new
balance (or a portion of it if you want to leave some money there to
keep the account open).
The validation of the LOC will involve various "shared secret" type
things between the banks involved. Possibly public key cryptoography
if that is still hard to break in the 3I.
You *can't* make credit or debit cards work *safely* even at a mere
one jump distance. At several jumps, it's even worse.
LOCs are, in effect, a special form of money used only between banks.
And rely on the banks being able to trust each other *and* on forgery
being difficult.
For ship crews, it's likely that you get paid from the ship's
account. If it's on a regular route, then they'll have working
accounts in each port. But fund transfer between them will still be
LOCs or something that amounts to the same thing.
Ships not running a fixed route will use LOCs and (for example) Free
Traders will be carrying a lot of their money in the form of cargo.
A crewmember *could* arrange to send money "home", but it'd be some
form of interbank transfer. And be a real pain in a lot of ways
because that money is going to be essentially inaccessible to him
until he returns home.
If he wants money from his home bank, he's going to have to request
it as a bank transfer and either wait for the requesyt to get there
and the transfer to get back, or he's going to have to try to request
that the transfer go to a bank where he expects to be when it
arrives.
Do note that even *inside* a solar system transactions between
planets will have *huge* lags as they wait for approval between
planets. 15 minutes to the better part of an hour for an Earth-Mars
message exchange, for example. 10 or more *hours* for an Earth-Pluto
exchange.
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com
> You make the transfer of information twofold. Your bankcard carries
> a record of its account balance along with you. As you conduct
> business from one world to the next your bankcard is updated. And
> records of these transactions get sent back to your bank along the
> mail route (traders can carry mail too) to your bank.
Alas, every merchant that can accept a card will have a terminal that
can update it. Which means that messing with thr transactions is
*way* too easy.
The on-card transaction history is only as secure as the *least*
secure merchant terminal.
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com
> I'm not talking about hijacking an xboat. The xboat network is a web,
> we can assume that there are a number of xboats at every hub but
> probably not enough to hit every star within J 6 every day of the
> year. This you're going to end up with lag between systems within J6
> that could end up being days or even weeks.
> What I'm talking about is exploiting the hole in the web created by
> prioritizing routes.
And "it's been done" *millennia* ago. That's the thing with the long
history of the various imperiums. "All" the scams were used centuries
ago and are either protected against (strong encryption/public keys
to verify inter bank transfers) or no longer possible (credit/debit
card use between systems).
It may be possible to *occasionally* pull off a scam. But those will
be mostly faking ID so they can use stolen Letters of Credit. If they
were easily forged (or even forgeable without *extreme* difficulty)
the banking system would fall apart.
Since there *is* a banking system, then LOCs must be essentially
impossible to forge, and for that matter they likely have enough info
to require *really* good fake ID to use a stolen one.
Mind you, every once in a while someone will conspire with someone at
another bank to issue invalid LOCs and convert them to cash or
valuable goods on another planet.
But that's just another form of embezzling.
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com
In general I assume most commercial transactions take place though a
network of banks/brokers who have relationships in the form of Letters of
credit and the like. Look at hawala as well.
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 6:19 PM, > wrote:
>
> You either carry cash, or you use "letters of credit".
>
> Cash can include the equivalent of traveller's cheques.
Leonard, Traveler's Checks are a form of Letter of Credit
--
Evyn