[Renaud]

I find it strange that you relate borrowing and ownership to financial asset management.

From that angle, it indeed doesn’t seem to make sense.

I think, but might be completely wrong, that viewing these actions from their usual meaning is more helpful: you own a toy, it’s yours to do as tou please. You borrow a toy, it’s not yours, you can’t do whatever you want with it, so you can’t hold on to it if the owner doesn’t allow it, and you can’t modify it for the same reasons.

[ithkuil]

Analogies often leak.

1. In real life I can borrow a toy from you and while I have that toy in my hands, the owner can exchange ownership with somebody else, while the object is borrowed by me. I.e. in real life the borrowing is orthogonal to ownership. In rust you can't do that.

2. Borrowing a toy is more akin to how mutable references work in rust. Immutable references allow multiple people to play with the same toy simultaneously, provided they don't change it.

Analogies are just analogies

[psychoslave]

What do you mean with usual sense? Maybe it's "financial" that put the interpretation out of the track, but financial comes fidus, that is trust, as in trust that outcomes of reality will meet some expectation of a mental representation.¹

"You own a toy" is the first thing a child is teached as wrong assumption by reality if not by careful social education, isn't it? The reality is, "you can play with the toy in some time frame, and sharing with others is the only way we can all benefit of joyful ludic moment, while claims of indefinite exclusive use of the toy despite limited attention span that an individual can spend on it is socially detrimental."

Also memory as an abstract object pragmatically operate on very different ground than a toy. If we could duplicate any human hand grabbable object as information carried by memory holding object, then any economy would virtually be a waste of human attention.

¹ edit: actually I was wrong here, I have been in confusion with "fiduciary". Finance instead comes from french "fin"(end), as in "end of debt".

[xnickb]

Many people can borrow your toy to have look at it, but only one person can borrow it and play with it. And they are only allowed to play while no one is watching. And if you want to modify your toy with some tool it's not your's anymore, it yas moved and now belongs to the tool.

I guess I'm trying to say that analogy is of limited use here.