using x9.59 for all account-based transactions would put debit & credit on a level playing field with regard to authenticated transactions (and promotes debit use over the internet). besides the significant difference in merchant cost infrastructure between the two ... the other remaining difference is the significant difference with regard to consumer recourse between the two ... i.e. credit has a lot of regs that effectively allow consumer to "trust" a transaction (not only based on trust in the merchant, but also in the merchant bank and the consumer bank) ... even a merchant that the consumer has had no prior knowledge and/or dealings with. This has been touted as a significant factor on the internet with the non-face-to-face characteristic of the consumer/merchant relationship and any consumer anywhere in the world could do business with any merchant anywhere in the world, aka the credit regs with regard to consumer recourse infrastructure providing significant benefit in such an environment (with merchant, merchant bank, consumer bank all having various levels of responsibility ... even in the case of a merchant going bankrupt; a significant issue for merchant banks with regard to credit is airline tickets ... a significant fee source, but also can be a major liability if the airline goes bankrupt). however, with regard to the internet trust issue ... the consumer e-commerce transactions don't have a random, homogeneous distribution between all consumers and all merchants ... the distribution tends to be quite skewed with possibly 20-30 locations accounting for 60-70 percent of all transactions and possibly 100 locations accounting for 90 percent of all transactions. There is much less of an "unknown" issue involving transactions with the top tier well-known merchants that everybody frequents as well as individual consumers having done multiple transactions with the same merchant(s) in the past. In this scenerio (for possibly 90 percent of internet transactions) there is much less of a difference between credit and debit with regard to the consumer not knowing and/or having no knowledge on which to base "trust" in the merchant. In the situation involving possibly 90+ percent of internet e-commerce consumer transactions the consumer would tend to have very little difference in the level of amprehension with regard to using either (x9.59) credit or (x9.59) debit for the transaction. Credit (either x9.59 or not) would still provide a consumer perceived advantage when dealing with the vast majority of the internet merchants that account for relatively trivial percentage of all transactions (aka rather than just judging whether they trust just the merchant, they can also rely on the trust in their consumer bank as well as possibly in the associated merchant bank). random refs: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm2.htm#useire2 U.S. & Ireland use digital signature http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm4.htm#0 Public Key Infrastructure: An Artifact... --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
