A decade ago the popularity of "feudal life" scenarios in science fiction and fantasy literature was attributed to the fact that in such settings "money never has to change hands."¹ Commentators asked:

When did a fantasy hero ever fish a ten dollar bill from his pocket? When did milady seek alimony? When were travellers' cheques needed in Atlantis or Cathay? When was the lead villain simply slung into prison for debt? When did the mortgage ever fall due on one of those labyrinthine castles?²

However, even as these questions were posed a new genre celebrated the cash, criminality, and computerized commerce of a future that has become today's headlines. Indeed, "cyberpunk" denotes more than science fiction that emphasizes the interaction of people with computers;³ it also refers to an individual who, like the protagonists of these novels, "make[s his] living buying, selling and stealing information, the currency of a computerized future."⁴ In both of these senses cyberpunk's authors anticipated the challenges posed by the convergence of today's banking, technology, and legal communities.

If other fictional settings allow novelists to avoid mundane financial transactions, cyberpunk not only confronts but glories in the grim and gritty commerce of the street. Indeed, its heroes can escape their physical and economic reality only by plunging into "cyberspace," mankind's "consensual hallucination, . . . [a] graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system."⁵ It is in this alternate, electronic universe, where multinational corporations hoard their data and where financial institutions store their electronic cash, that cyberpunks practice their esoteric digital deceptions.

In its emphasis on the technological interface between the commercial and the criminal, this literature illuminates many issues central to the current controversies over electronic forms of cash. A survey of these areas is provided in this Book by Richard Field's 1996: Survey of the Year's Developments in Electronic Cash Law and the Laws Affecting Electronic Banking in the United States, and taken several steps further by Brian Smith's How Best to Guide the Evolution of Electronic Currency La.

To begin, cyberpunk explores the worldwide culture of a society in which traditional forms of currency_bills and coins_not only are outmoded but generally are disfavored.⁶ Whether this development was the result of governmental collapse, global unification, or the increased use of Internet commerce_and many of the novelists are vague on that point_it raises the questions of whether, when, and how electronic cash might displace traditional currency in a form of Gresham's Law. Moreover, cyberpunk's focus on this transition echoes current concerns over whether the "unbanked" will benefit from or be even more disadvantaged by a widespread shift to electronic payment systems. Professor David Oedel's Why Regulate Cybermoney? addresses some of these issues.

To replace cash the cyberpunk canon introduces a panoply of exotic payment mechanisms such as "bearer chips,"⁷ "credit chips,"⁸ "bearer cards,"⁹ debit cards,¹⁰ "credit disks,"¹¹ "cash cards,"¹² and "credit transactors."¹³ The proliferation of these devices, and the abbreviated way in which their operations are described, evokes the debates currently raging over the extent to which stored value cards should be regulated. Do consumers truly understand their rights and potential liabilities when they use the real-life counterparts of these fictional products? Professor Mark Budnitz examines these and related issues from the perspective of a consumer advocate in his article, Stored Value Cards and the Consumer: The Need for Regulation. Gary Lorenz contributes the perspective of an issuer of stored value cards in his Electronic Stored Value Payment Systems, Market Position and Regulatory Issues.

Like an increasing number of today's consumers and businesses, the characters in cyberpunk fiction conduct transactions over the Internet itself.¹⁴ Their attempts to preserve their privacy and anonymity during these activities¹⁵ foreshadow the analysis of this Book's How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash, by Laurie Law, Susan Sabett, and Jerry Solinas of the National Security Agency. Cyberpunk also predicts the issuance of money by private parties, including multinational corporations and perhaps criminal organizations,¹⁶ and the danger that electronic cash may be used in money-laundering operations.¹⁷ Both of these developments are addressed from a banker's viewpoint in Simon Lelieveldt's How to Regulate Electronic Cash: An Overview of Regulatory Issues and Strategies.

Finally, both science fiction and several of the articles in this Book discuss the jurisdictional difficulties inherent in governing a "space that [i]sn't space"¹⁸ in which individuals who may be concealing their identities can conduct instantaneous transactions by means of intangible forms of cash. The seminal cyberpunk novel vividly portrays the dilemma of balancing rules and standards: the protagonist asks government authorities, "Do you guys have any real jurisdiction out here?" only to be told, "It doesn't matter . . . . We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our [agency] operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we create flexibility, in situations where it is required."¹⁹

As today's payments technology nears that of science fiction, the regulatory responses to each of the issues addressed in this Book will shape electronic cash, its application, and its culture for years to come. At this critical point in the history of money, cyberpunk offers a cautionary vision of the transition from "two bits" to megabytes, from a pair of dimes to new paradigms.

* © 1997 Walter Effross. All rights reserved.

** Associate Professor, Washington College of Law. Professor Effross also is the author of Putting the Cards Before the Purse?: Distinctions, Differences, and Dilemmas in the Regulation of Stored Value Card Systems, 62 MO. L. REV. (forthcoming 1997); and High-Tech Heroes, Virtual Villains, and Jacked-In Justice: Visions of Law and Lawyers in Cyberpunk Science Fiction, 45 BUFF. L. REV. (forthcoming 1997).

In the summer of 1996, I suggested to Dean Claudio Grossman and Editor-in-Chief Mira Vayda that The Law Review devote an issue to the Electronic Future of Cash in connection with a Symposium to be held at the Washington College of Law in the spring of 1997. I would like to thank both of them for their encouragement, their advice, and their commitment of the School's resources to these projects. Special thanks are due to Heather Russell, The Law Review's Senior Articles Editor, who oversaw the selection of the articles that appear in this Volume and who, as my research assistant, worked tirelessly and painstakingly to help me coordinate the logistics of the Symposium itself.