Until then, commerce over long distances was done with trade in wares. Nearly four hundred years later, we don't question the paper and electronic instruments we use for moving around this mysteriously conserved value-representing fluid, money. Cash, checks, credit cards. Cash belongs to whoever has it with them, physically, in their pockets or mason jars. The records kept of cash are few.
Credit is another method of declaring a money transaction.
There is a lot of money being made by credit card companies. At the age of twenty-eight, I, David Nicol, now working for the University of Missouri, was reading a story on UseNet news and realized that if I had been reading the story in print, I might have paid the author for writing, in some indirect way, for instance by reading the story in a book which would have been purchased, giving the author their little royalty percentage. I had recently read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, in which the main character Hiro Protagonist augments his meager income from delivering pizza by discovering useful facts and sharing them with a slightly modified UseNet in which the readers of articles pay a small amount of money to the writers. This seemed high to me, since all steps of the process could be automated. I set out to create an alternate transaction paradigm, which would work the way I had imagined credit cards worked when I was young.