That's an implementation detail; particularly if there is some legal backing (government regulation of the good kind) for the transfer mechanism. Think somethin

That's an implementation detail; particularly if there is some legal backing (government regulation of the good kind) for the transfer mechanism. Think something using the Ripple protocol backed by a bank fund that holds 1 dollar for every "coin" represented in the system. If transaction confirmations took less than 500 milliseconds and had at least two confirmations from a network that had some form of insurance against double spend (rare and very noticeable) and identity theft (more common, but also noticeable) and auth token theft (relatively common). You could have something that looked like a general purpose internet mediated payment mechanism of sufficient (but not perfect) security; that would be relatively backwards compatible with existing infrastructure and resistant to attacks that merely depend on access to stored data rather than controlling a distributed ledger.