On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Adam Back wrote: > Well I also am pretty anti-patent, especially the xor-cursor and > business process kind, but at least these ecash patents are not > frivolous patents (well Chaum's RSA blinding online scheme may look > pretty simple once you've seen it but Brands stuff is pretty > non-obvious). Plus for the particular application of ecash it would > seem the biggest stumbling blocks are:
Patent's aren't the problem - price of royalty is. If Brands is willing to get .000001 cents per bank per day, he'll be plenty rich and the banks won't lose too much. But the reason we have AC today is because Tesla requested no royalties on his motor/generator. Something for Brands to think about. > - deployment / chicken and egg problem (merchants want lots of users > before they're interested users want wide merchant acceptance before > their interested) If people believe (notice Tim?) that when they transfer bits from their electronic wallet to the dealer, and the bank believes when the dealer transfers bits into his account that the bits are "money" then everybody will want to use it. The idea of "coins" isn't fluid enough, people want something more like a checkbook. They can move any amount of money from their wallet to somebody else's wallet, and it needs to be just like cash - it can have a serial number, but it's not linked to any person. Merchants don't like credit cards because it costs them. If they could use electronic cash - they'd take it in a heartbeat. Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
