Digital Cash and the Governance of Payment Finality: Supplementary Appendix

Abstract

Supplementary appendix to the article "Digital Cash and the Governance of Payment Finality." It contains material displaced from the main text for length, referenced at the corresponding points in the article, and forming no part of the manuscript word count. The appendix documents in full the evidence that claims for digital cash treat technical irreversibility as legal finality, with the passages and page references from Böhme, Christin, Edelman and Moore (2015), Cong and He (2018), De Filippi and Hassan (2016), Kiviat (2015), Atzori (2017) and Politou, Casino, Alepis and Patsakis (2019), together with the passages in which several of those authors qualify or abandon the claim. It further sets out the argument that append-only recording does not entail unrecoverable entitlement: the regulatory history of write-once, read-many electronic recordkeeping under SEC Rule 17a-4 and its 2022 amendment; the accounting mechanics by which a chargeback operates as a contra entry rather than an erasure; the equivalence between that mechanism and reversal by subsequent transaction on a distributed ledger; and two limits on the argument, being value irretrievable because no person holds the key, and records whose own existence is the wrong, as with personal data subject to an erasure right.