Quote from: BitMagic on December 06, 2011, 09:31:12 PM

Do you see what I'm getting at? The entire value of these things (minus the raw brass, silver, or gold) is dependent on 1) Mike being honest, and 2) you never being able to verify if mike was honest with the coin you're holding. He sells an object that requires you to risk throwing away everything you paid for it just to be certain you can trust him.

If you go to the grocery store and buy yourself ham for dinner, you are staking your entire life on 1) the integrity of the store, as well as every employee they hired off the street and every unknown person in their supply chain, that they didn't taint it with something that will kill you, and 2) you never being able to verify that the meal you bought was tainted, without eating it and risking your life, or else sending it to a lab to ensure it's truly poison free (which is not only expensive, but the meal will be spoiled and unusable as dinner by the time the lab is done with it). So, in practice, going to the grocery store and buying dinner requires that you risk ending your entire life just for convenience of having someone else raise and prepare an animal for you to eat for dinner.

Of course, practically speaking, the store has an incentive not to sell you food that will kill you, it's bad for their business. And they would also likely be liable for your injury or death. Every city in the USA is plastered with billboards for lawyers who would love to get in on the action if it ever happened. Those two controls are good enough that you still patronize the grocery store.

I'm not a whole lot different.