The U.S. and other developed nations are undergoing a transition from a paper econ- omy to a digital economy, not unlike the transition from an oral exchange economy to a physically recorded (clay, papyrus) exchange economy that took place several millennia ago. As with the earlier transition, a change in the medium for recording and reporting transactions (i.e., from oral to written, from written to electronic) is bringing about a significant change in the economic and social system in which they are imbedded. The oral-to-written transition eventually gave us the concepts of property rights,...