On a 'philosophical' question about Banach envelopes

Abstract

We show how to construct nonlocally convex quasi-Banach spaces $X$ whose dual separates the points of a dense subspace of $X$ but does not separate the points of $X$. Our examples connect with a question raised by Pietsch [About the Banach envelope of $l_{1,\infty}$, Rev. Mat. Complut. 22 (2009), 209-226] and shed light into the unexplored class of quasi-Banach spaces with nontrivial dual which do not have sufficiently many functionals to separate the points of the space.