Mike Rosing wrote: [...] > It'd be cool to have electronic paper bills - flexable/cloth electronics > where the value of the bill is variable. At each transaction, the bill > reduces the amount it has (plain old smart card stuff) but it'd have > the look and feel of paper money.
I'd rather have stiff cards than floppy paper ones. At least you can put them into the slot of a machine easily. > the transaction machines that work > with the bills would all need to be online, but you could easily trade > bills for anonymous barter. It might even be easy to have a reader that > just tells how much is left in the bill. The point here isn't technology, > it's psycology. The bill "looks" like money, so people will trust that > it is :-) But paper money is such a 20th-century thing! These days we're slowly drifting back to higher value metal coins (2 pounds out for a few years now, 5 pounds coming soon I think). Much more fun. Feels like real treasure! Less of the floppy stuff, we want our ecash to look like real cash. Ken