New thread about deployment barriers to explore the topic of whether there are now more internet services and technologies that would allow us to get closer to deployment of ecash. (It would be about time you'd think).
On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 08:30:07AM +0200, Anonymous wrote: > [...] > Of course Brands is patented up the wazoo. It's amazing the harm > he and Chaum have done to the world by locking up their best ideas. > And they didn't even get rich. What a waste. If either of them had > the balls to put their patents into the public domain, they could make > a very comfortable living just from consulting and speaking fees. 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: - deployment / chicken and egg problem (merchants want lots of users before they're interested users want wide merchant acceptance before their interested) - interface to banking infrastructure given the most convenient way to pay is highly fraud prone (credit cards) -- clearly interfacing a fraud prone system to a cryptographically anonymous ecash system is a recipie for disaster -- it creates the perfect crime for people to cash in on stolen credit-cards. - claimed banking regulation problems. However I'm not sure how much of a barrier this is actually -- I mean MTB digicash did actually operate a payer anonymous scheme (which also indirectly could be used for payee anonymity). so perhaps for this case application patents are not slowing deployment. On the other side patents allow companies to raise finances and big businesses like banks etc may even _like_ to see patents as a more tangible reason to deal with one technology company. > [...] there doesn't need to be a bank; just a coin exchanging mint. > > We talked about this a while ago. You start it up and it emits one > coin, which represents all of the value of this mint's money supply. So this would be the argument for a closed supply of money in the system, like the digicash betabucks where they stated up from that they would only issue 1,000,000 betabucks. People trade them based on supply and demand. Perhaps. Though at the time Wei Dai had some arguments at the time that if they were popular, they would be a good investment and people would have an incentive to hold on to them which would make them difficult to obtain, highly inflationary, and hard to use. Also who gets the first coins. Just give them free to the first n people that ask and then let market decide from there. Also the in-out exchange is less convenient. Perhaps with paypal now having wider acceptance people would trade this kind of digicash beta-bucks like scheme for real money paying with paypal with bidding on ebay as for the everquest internal currency. That might be an interesting experiment. Or better yet for everquest or other popular VR gaming thing to replace their currency by digicash currency server, privacy for VR characters and their real-life players. Adam -- http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/
