Delivery of Underlying Value

Sensible Taler demands prompt delivery. Physical delivery can be an option if the currency is tangible.

The delivery of the underlying value is the ultimate right of any Sensible Taler currency. This right must not be eroded, lest its full backing come into question, or its trust would erode to faith. Sensible Taler would be a useless addition if it reinvented the mistakes made by fiat currencies.

When mutual accounts are not considered the right way to claim a value, then it may have to be passed.

Depending on the value, the title of ownership may be passed in the form of a digitally signed mechanism. TODO: Find or define a standard for this.

Another option could be to pass the value through an exchange service, which cashes out the monetary value in a (fiat) currency of the recipient's choosing.

Finally, it is possible to arrange physical delivery of the underlying value, if it is a tangible good such as gold. Such actions may incur shipping and insurance fees and could be inefficient. It is common for gold depots to provide this kind of service, under their own commercial terms.

In other cases, it could be a highly efficient method of settlement. Consider gold depots that pile up claims in mutual accounts; these could be balanced with a physical transfer, for instance by passing a bar of gold from one peer's reserve to another peer's reserve. Those gold systems tend to have pallets with gold bars in protected vaults, and a physical transfer could be assignment of the ownership of a gold bar inside the vault or, when they have individual pallets in the vault, have a bar moved from one pallet to another by vault personnel. Since this incurs no real risk and is strictly performed by carefully selected personnel, this can be a highly efficient move when the two gold depots use the same gold depot. This is quite common; most are present in a multitude of vaults, and can agree on such physical swaps quite easily.

Physical delivery of gold to a gold system be a way for anyone to do the reverse of cashing out, namely depositing gold in an account or receiving Sensible Taler currncy for it. In this case the insurance and transport expenses would be paid by the sender.