More on the security front

 The foundry bot is working a rate control on the assembly line; humans have only an imprecise estimate of how many blank gate arrays to pre-order.

A smart card will expire itself, at the preset limit given by the foundry bot.  It no longer makes verification transactions, and it ends up as a dormant leaf in the card chain, pretty much forever. The foundry bot watches the verification reports coming in.

All the limit bounds in the smart card are masked.  It has a credit limit bound, a time of validity bound, and a wait time  bound on a transaction basis, and a bound on over all transaction rate.  The limits on the card, as general categories are revealed, the card can be stamped.

Now how does the bot manage to monitor supply and demand so well? The bot is finding an imprecise encoding of the incoming verification reports, and comparing that to the actual release sequence.  The bot finds that level of precision when they match. It then it has the canonical binary distribution graph of the real cards flowing,with the card types,through the economy.

 In a sense, for pure cash, this is the central banker function. And in reality it is what makes pure cash work as the lightest weight, immutable good around