It's all hypothetical at the moment, but that scenario would seem to be supported by the section on devices: https://ecashact.us/#devices. You would need a separate device capable of transferring funds between bearer devices, but those would presumably be widely available, as every merchant would also need one to accept ecash for a transaction or to issue a refund.

So for instance, you might transfer $X/week to an app on your kid's phone for lunch money, or put $X on your "walking around" card, both of which could draw from a different instrument you leave at home that has a larger reserve on it.

I wonder how they will deal with theft?

You wouldn't need to be at an ATM to be robbed of all the money in your bank. A thief could just walk up in broad daylight, hold you up, make you put your card in and transfer everything out of your bank right now and then walk away.

If you made the mistake of having everything available right now you could lose it all in a matter of minutes.

Yeah, that would be terrible! I would expect that this would be reframed a user education issue, as in, don't carry more ecash on you than you're willing to lose (same as physical cash). That would only be workable if they made it easy to maintain multiple instruments and transfer funds between them.

What would the recourse be if thieves just broke into your house and made you transfer everything over from your main account?

I don't think that would be a common occurrence but it would probably happen at least once. How would you go about getting your money back or tracing the thieves down if they can take the money they stole and convert it to physical cash at an ATM 5 miles away from you?

There would be little recourse other than this ebanking system refunding you your money directly.

New systems create new opportunities for crime, how will we prepare ourselves for that before we are forced to live with it?

> There would be little recourse other than this ebanking system refunding you your money directly.

Depending on how the system is designed, such a refund may not be possible. I'm guessing that an offline-enabled ecash system would not support revoking and reissuing currency units, so you might be SOL.

> What would the recourse be if thieves just broke into your house and made you transfer everything over from your main account?

I want to say that this is no different than if you kept cash, gold, art, jewelry, etc., in your house, but ecash would be uniquely easy to conceal and smuggle across borders, so ecash would be a more attractive target for thieves than even an equivalent amount of gold. I'd love to see a deeper discussion by the lawmakers sponsoring the bill because I suspect there is no great answer to your question.

Yeah, I'm mostly worried about the idea that you could not decouple your banking information from your person. You could be robbed at 3 in the morning the same as being frog marched at gunpoint into your local institution during your lunch break, but in this case your local bank would have no guards, no tellers, no video cameras, no red button to summon the police and no way to secure your section of the vault against intruders.

I don't know how they would provide any level of protection for your assets that you didn't provide yourself. If they figure that out then I'm all for it.

So to understand it better are those devices like a hardware crypto wallet like Ledger?

Yes, they would be hardware wallets or phone apps relying on TPM. There is some more info on possible options at https://ecashact.us/#hardware