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will be a key to accumulating wealth and power in the twenty-first century (Weatherford 1997: 245-246).
Central to the accumulation of electronic seigniorage will be the ability of these companies to find attractive and, more importantly, credible ways to offer smart cards or network money on credit, denominated in newly coined digital units, in the same way that commercial banks have long created money by making loans denominated in state-sanctioned units of account. The opportunity for virtual lending lies in the issuers' float: the volume of unclaimed e-money liabilities. Insofar as claimants choose to hold their e-money balances for some time as a store of value, rather than cash them in immediately, resources will become available for generating income through credit creation. All that income will of course go to the issuers themselves, except for any costs associated with promotion of their new units of purchasing power.
Critical issues
The process will not happen overnight, of course. Quite the contrary, the emergence of e-money as a genuine rival to conventional currencies actually is apt to be quite slow and could take most of the next century to be completed. To begin, a number of tricky technical issues will have to be addressed, including inter alia adequate provisions for security (protection against theft or fraud), anonymity (assurance of privacy), and portability (independence of physical location). None of these challenges is apt to be resolved swiftly or painlessly.
Even more critical is the issue is trust: how to command confidence in any new form of money. Many believe that general acceptability can derive only from the sovereign power of the state, as the German economist George Knapp contended nearly a century ago (Knapp 1905). According to Knapp's "state theory of money," all money is a product of law and dependent for its validity on formal ordinances, such as legal-tender laws (specifying what currency must be accepted in payment of a debt) and public-receivability provisions (specifying what currency may be used to pay taxes or satisfy other contractual obligations to the state). But that is an unduly restrictive view of actual usage, which in fact admits of a much wider range of influences. At its most fundamental money is a social institution, resting on the reciprocal faith of a critical mass of transactors (Dodd 1994; Zelizer 1994). Confidence ultimately is socially constructed, based implicitly or explicitly on an intersubjective understanding about an instrument's future value and usability, and may well reflect nothing more than the gradual accumulation of competitive market practice. Money is whatever people come to believe will be accepted by others, for whatever reason. Numerous examples of monetary history -- from the playing-card currency that circulated in France's North American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the cigarettes and chewing gum that served as popular media of exchange in post-World War II Germany -- demonstrate that state power is by no means the only source of trust in a money (Weatherford 1997). Past experiences of free banking across a broad span of countries, from Scotland to Australia, give ample evidence of the capacity of private issuers to promote general acceptability for their product (Dowd 1992).
Of course, that does not mean that promoting trust in newly created electronic monies will be easy, give