Only if you take pen sized to equal pen shaped I see credsticks as having rounded edges.
Anyway how do your runners keep track of there nuyen. Bank accounts have a nasty habit of datatrails. Credsticks do not.

Except for Certified Credsticks, where the money actually is encoded onto the stick.

And with the wireless world of 2070, even stick-to-stick (or commlink-to-commlink) transactions are verified and completed pretty much instantaneously.

Hmm I don't think the tags are that small.

People don't lose their commlinks in SR4... And there's no such thing as ubiquitous identity theft due to millions of idiots who leave their default settings on and thus broadcast their SINs and personal info to everyone on the planet without the slightest shred of security.

No, I don't think the fluff for commlinks is stupid. Never.

Yeah, I know. It's like how my ass is a pin cushion because I carry keys all the time.

Oh, wait. That's exactly what doesn't happen. Because, see, I and most people don't purposefully stick pointy shit in our back pockets and then sit down.

would you care to explain how you can't lose a commlink? it's hardware

Ever leave the house while wearing a certain pair of underwear, and come back at some point in time later, and realize that sometime when you were out you misplaced that underwear, but have no idea where?

The intimacy level between commlink users and their commlinks is about the same.

Although, the situation described by the original poster isn't so much loss as it is deliberate taking.

Anyone else hear a loud *WHOOSH* sound?

It was a wild night. I'll leave it at that.



Any fake SINs on a captured comlink can be assumed to be compromised. While you can probably access those bank accounts, the individual who has your comlink will probably know when and where you did.

As for the underground economy ....
The government doesn't want to stop the trade of illegal goods and services, ever. They pay lip service to the enforcement of laws against identity theft, drug dealing, selling stolen goods, and the like. However, they do not want these things to stop under any circumstances. Why? Because, contrary to popular belief, they actually contribute to the national economy. They contribute a lot to the national economy. The drug lords who get rich off of your habit are going to spend their money on 42-inch 1080p plasma-screen televisions and multi-million dollar mansions and giant yachts and all of that other crap, sending their ill-gotten gains right back into the economy.
More importantly, the some laws, and the justifications for those laws, support this. For example, in the United States Federal law prohibits the growth of marijuana for personal use. This isn't intended to prevent people from smoking marijuana because that isn't a valid function of the federal government. The purpose of the law is to encourage individuals to purchase marijuana from criminal dealers since individuals who grow their own marijuana will not buy from dealers. Regulating the economy and encouraging economic growth are valid functions of government even if the economic activity that they are encouraging is illegal.

While every transaction you make will be monitored, they'll only get you if they want to get you and they'll only want to get you if not getting you will cost them more than getting you will. If they look at your financial records and see that your selling millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs every year and spending it on luxury goods that were made in the good ole' UCAS they'll probably core more about the fact that you are contributing to the economy than they will about the fact that you are breaking the law and they won't bother you.
The law really isn't the law. They say it is the law, but only because they have to in order to look proper. They expect you to pay it the same lip serivce and keep your ass covered so that their failure to prosecute you doesn't become an embarassing news story. If you do that you're home free.

On a smaller scale, their are also jurisdictional issues. The UCAS federal government is not the supreme economic regulatory body in the UCAS. The Corporate Court holds that position everywhere on earth and in human colonized space. Banking in the UCAS is not regulated to the Federal Reserve. It is regulated by Zürich Orbital. Heck, most banks are going to belong to megacorps.
If Lone Star Seattle wants your financial records they'll have to go through more red-tape than all all the elves at Santa's North Pole sweatshop.
And even getting records to legal transactions aren't each. The Sovereign Nation of Stuffer Shack doesn't take too kindly to outside interference in their affairs, after all, and one thing you should never forget is that your corner chain grocery store is a sovereign entity thanks to one really brilliant USA Supreme Court decision.

Your Commlink!

Other than that, we pretty much answered this already. You don't automatically lose your SIN (but it may be compromised in some way), you don't automatically lose your money. You buy a new Commlink.

That defeats the whole purpose of a Certified Credstick. Its main reason for existence is to be a vehicle of untraceable money. The money is actually coded onto the chip itself, and is no longer in the banking system until such time as it is transfered from the credstick to an actual account (either yours or someone else's).

I think the Corps would come down pretty hard on the financial institution that started seeding certified credsticks with worms or RFID tags.

Taking the "deniable" out of the "deniable assets" that the corporate community as a whole depends on to get certain things done is sort of like launching a salvo of intercontinental ballistic nukes during the cold war. Sure, several parties are capable of it, but they all know that it's a shitty idea that just spoils the party for everyone.

So, using a REALLY complex encryption scheme it takes someone almost 30 seconds to break and duplicate using them great SR4 hacking rules? Don't you love them?

If you have a hash that shows the data and the value and know where the money went you have an audit trail that shows where this device was used for the life of the device and how much was spent where.

Which means if someone follows you to the stuffer shack and you pay with a certified credstick they can then retrieve your the entire transaction history and get the future transactions automatically from the bank. And they can find out who put the money in the unit. Which makes it not exactly as untracable as it is reputed to be.

It's logical. My interpretation was that it was a transfer tool like a cashiers check written to cash, where (again) the money isn't in the device, it's automatically transfered to whoever uses it (all the money or none, no partial transfers). You just have to fix the stupidity that is the encryption rules.

I also used to think that Certified Credsticks were an 'all or nothing' affair, but I got beaten down soundly here when I voiced that concept.

Personal attacks are against DSF policies. Insulting another member does nothing to further a conversation. Please refrain from making them. Thanks.

And the Johnson could also use the certified credsticks as an anchor for Turn to Goo and scrape your team off the sidewalk, literally.

The difference between one negotiable note and another is rather minimal. The think about paper money is that it was originally back by gold and silver. Your silver notes were exchangeable for a certain amount of silver if the bearer presented it to the issuing bank and your gold notes were exchangeable for a certain amount of gold at the issueing bank.. This is where the term 'pounds sterling' in the British monetary system comes from. Originally, each pound represented a Troy pound of sterling silver.
Now, in the United States and many other places you had a problem where different banks would issue their own incompatible currencies and this is, in fact, still legal in Scotland. However, because these bank notes were not universally accepted they sometimes produced problems. Standardized national currencies fixed this because it is guaranteed by the government rather than by a private institution and because it is illegal not to accept government issued currency in most countries.

However, most countries are no longer using gold or silver standard. They use fiat money which has value for no other reason than the fact that someone says it does. The Nuyen is a form of fiat money that is issued by Zürich Orbital Group. The certified credstick is a method of printing that money, not unlike yesterday's paper currencies. The data on the credstick is not tied to an actual bank account. The data has a value because ZOG says it does and people trust ZOG.

Money orders have value because the issuer promises to exchange them for something else of value. They are a promissory note, not fiat money.

Fiat money is not redeemable. The issuer will not exchange it for anything else of value. Instead, it has value based on market forces because people choose to accept it.

And the Bank of England has been issuing notes for more than three centuries now.

Of course, but it wasn't standardized as the "pound sterling" until 1560, until then there were multiple different private currency systems in use. And the Bank of England didn't begin issuing currency until 1694 because the Bank of England did not exist until 1694.

And while Fiat money originated as government promissory notes, they are most certain not promissory notes. Their value is purely abstract while the value of a promissory note is concrete.