Open-Transactions democratizes financial and monetary actions. You can use it for issuing currencies/stock, paying dividends, creating asset accounts, sending/receiving digital cash, writing/depositing cheques, cashier's cheques, creating basket currencies, trading on markets, scripting custom agreements, recurring payments, escrow, etc. Open-Transactions uses strong crypto. The balances are unchangeable (even by a malicious server.) The receipt history is destructible. The transactions are unforgeable. The cash is unlinkable. The cheques are non-repudiable. Etc.
This makes ctrl-c and other program-canceled situations handled more gracefully on Linux (and Windows - da2ce7).
Still not perfect (need to make signal handler low-level signal compatible_ but it clears the locks and program can be rund again easily.