Slashdot Mirror
Where is My Digital Cash?
LinuxTek asks: "Using the IBM commercial as a starting point (the one with the guy from DS9 asking about flying cars), I ask you, where is my digital cash? I remember a couple of years ago all the hype about digital money and several companies that were supposed to make a revolution in micropayment and 'secure' online purchase (i.e. anonymous). I remember Digicash as being one of the most promising companies, and I even remember downloading their digital wallet test app. It seems they went out of business and sold their patents to eCash, but now I can't even acces the eCash site. Does anyone know if there are other projects like this (still alive), and/or Open Source alternatives? Digital money should be a reality by now."
"Digital money should be a reality by now." Oh really? Why is that? What does this digital money do that my regular money doesn't? I don't believe any digital claims of security anyway. My physical money is in my wallet and you'd have to hack ME to get it. Banks have physical money SOMEWHERE, and I'm pretty sure it's safer than digital money. Even if the bank gets "hacked" I have plenty of documents to show the bank that they're wrong. On the flip side, consider Paypal...
I have paper cash in my wallet. It is lightweight, accepted everywhere and there are no fees or auditing associated with it.
With eCash, I'll invariably be paying fees for using my money and whomever is running the system & the government will be able to track or audit my activity.
If you don't want to carry cash, call American Express and get a credit or charge card.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
e-gold is still going strong. Just like in Cryptonomicon, only without quite so many stupendous badasses.
We could all just email IOU's to eachother...
Oh! Ooh!
Please send royalty payments via check or money order to...
Where is My Digital Cash?
It got stolen by hackers. Sorry.
I ask you, where is my digital cash?
REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP
FIRST, I MUST SOLICIT YOUR STRICTEST CONFIDENCE IN THIS TRANSACTION. THIS IS BY VIRTUE OF ITS NATURE AS BEING UTTERLY CONFIDENTIAL AND 'TOP SECRET'. I AM SURE AND HAVE CONFIDENCE OF YOUR ABILITY AND RELIABILITY TO PROSECUTE A TRANSACTION OF THIS GREAT MAGNITUDE INVOLVING A PENDING TRANSACTION REQUIRING MAXIIMUM CONFIDENCE.
IN MY COUNTRY, I AM THE FORMER MINISTER OF DIGITAL CASH, A CHANGE IN GOVERNMENTS HAS LEFT US WITH 30 GIGABYTES (GB) OF eCASH. IF YOU ARE WILLING TO ASSIST US IN DOWNLOAD IT, I WILL GIVE YOU 10% (3 GB) OF eCASH.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT MY BROTHER IN-LAW MR. BELLO ABACHA IMMEDIATELY ON TELEPHONE NUMBER 234-1-7591526 OR FAX NUMBER 234-1-759O845 WHO WILL INFORM YOU PROPERLY ON THE PROCEDURES FOR EXECUTION . PLEASE, BE INFORMED THAT THIS PROPOSAL IS 100% RISK FREE. HOWEVER, THE CONFIDENTIALITY OF THIS PROPOSAL IS VERY IMPORTANT.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The idea of completly electronic money seems to me is every bit as flawed as the fiat we use in day to day transactions, in the sense that there are no direct limits on how much money is generated.
When there are entities generating money out of nothing like the Fed, and engaging in fractional reserve banking, like regular banks, it forces normal people to speculate in order to preserve the value of their savings. When gold was used as money, money preserve its value and there had been little net inflation over the thousands of years that gold and silver were used as money.
Therefore it's better to migrate to some more stable alternatives that are 100% backed by gold. These currencies exist and can be used to buy anything that can be paid with a credit card.
Such as:
ebullion
egold
Where were you and you when I had mod points two days ago? Folks, if you don't even know what digital money is, don't bother posting your ill-informed opinions!
:)
The problem to date, dear Ask Slashdotter, is that no digital money company has been able to get their heads out of their technology centered asses and talk to their customers. They would rather put together a presentation that talks about public key cryptography and e-wallets, than actually talk about the benefits to the consumer. PayPal is leading the way because they 1) didn't create a new currency and 2) worked with a paradigm that everyone understands: bank accounts.
What should happen now is that digital money companies should create a product that uses cryptography and all those groovy things and links into systems like PayPal. When digital money companies start talking about what the customer gets out of it, then we'll get somewhere.
On a similar note, what does the customer get out of a flying car?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Fax me your cash
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
What I mean is, having some magic string of bits that stands alone, with no link to a central server etc., and can be swapped around, will never happen. Because whatever those strings of bits are, they can be duplicated digitally.
So I think it is better to talk about digital checks or digital credit cards or whatever. So you pass around some blob, but to validate that blog and assign it a new owner, you have to go to some central repository.
Then you have to ask, what would happen to the checking system or the credit card system if they had a bunch of tiny transactions, checks for 5 cents and credit card payments of 3 cents? Well, either the central repositories would complain (because their percentage cut was too small per transaction) or the users would complain (because paying 14 cents for a virtual check for 3 cents makes about as much sense as paying 14 cents for a paper check and then writing it for 3 cents) or businesses getting paid would complain (for either of those two reasons).
Thus, the only way micropayments could work is without a central repository, using pure stand-alone digital money. And since stand-alone digital money is impossible, micropayments won't ever work.
- adam
I want my flying car!!! I can pay cash.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
The biggest difficulty to be an actor on the market is getting the trust from the end-users when you are a new company and want to take care of their money.
It explains why so many startups have failed and why the ones who are still alive now directly sell their technology -white box- to telcos, ISPs or banks to operate the system themselves.
14
Governments would love to tax these small, currently impractical to keep "on the books" transactions. What they will call digital cash will in reality be an EFT system in which every transaction is rigorously tracked, and will eventually supplant currency, making it impossible to opt out, save for barter.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
Your digital cash will arrive in 2005, when an important David Chaum patent expires.
- adam
The problem with .5% of 5000 3 cent transactions is that they cost 5000 times as much to record and store as a single .5% of 3 cents transaction. The credit cards work because most transactions are not for 3 cents but instead for enough that they can take a reasonable per-transaction cut. If every transaction was 3 cents the credit cards would lose lots of money (ignoring interest payments, their other source of income).
- adam
PayPal is what happened to digital cash. They're the best (only?) option out there for micropayments and such, but I've heard enough PayPal horror stories that I'm not about to trust them with my money.
Maybe if a bank comes up with a viable micropayment method, or maybe if PayPal admits that they are acting as a bank and submit to regulation, then maybe digital cash will happen. It's all about trust, and nobody trustworthy is making digital cash happen.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I'm seeing a parallel here. It's probably mostly my imagination, but I think there might be a grain of truth to it.
Time and again, it's been demonstrated that any crypto system that precludes resourceful and clever people from getting at stuff they want will be subjected to scrutiny, attacked, and finally broken. Whenever the subject of copy protection and copy-protected media comes up on Slashdot, quick are those who like to point out that every scheme that has been deployed and that has been worth attacking has been attacked and defeated. Many people seem to hold the opinion that this is an inevitable and unavoidable fact of life in the computer age.
Then, over here in this other corner, we have a bunch of people talking about ways of representing money that are purely digital, and that are purely self-contained. After all, it's important that people be able to conduct financial transactions over the Internet with complete anonymity. So ideas like "eCash" and "eGold" get battered around as if it were only a matter of getting the details hammered out.
These two notions, when placed in juxtaposition to one another, amuse me. History-- if we can use that term to refer to a period of a decade or so-- has shown us that it's much harder to build strong crypto systems than most people realize it is, and that even apparently strong systems are vulnerable to attack in ways that can't be defended against, or even predicted. And yet, here we are, debating the virtues of trying to guarantee the integrity of intangible value itself with just such a system.
Hubris, I tells ya. It's all fun and games until somebody loses their life savings.
I write in my journal
would be Avery Brooks, AKA Captain Benjamin Sisko...and he should know perfectly well that his flying cars are in front of the bluescreen or greenscreen or whatever!
I should have picked out the nickname Demosthenes!Tecumseh.
i notice that many of these cybercash providers provide debit cards, but they all cost. does anyone know where one might find a free international debit card?
jasp
I made several points you didn't address at all.
1. Why is digital money good? You say that digital money companies need to make a product and market it. WHAT PRODUCT COULD THEY POSSIBLY OFFER ME? I have a bank and I have paypal. I have never run into a situation where some kind of money service I needed wasn't available through one of those 2 institutions.
2. Even Paypal has security problems. Banks don't, end of story.
Your post makes no sense.
I said: Digital money is not useful to me.
You said: Digital money companies need to advertise more.
You don't explain why I should actually WANT digital money.
"When digital money companies start talking about what the customer gets out of it, then we'll get somewhere."
Again:
1)WHAT DOES THE CUSTOMER GET OUT OF IT?
2)Where are we trying to "go?" What is this "somewhere" that we're trying to get to?
Just because it's "digital" doesn't mean it's better or even good or useful.
Heres $10. :P
Click File->Save and lo, u got it stored on ur comp. How much more do u want ?
What would really be interesting if each individual could get a unique digital signature and hence mint his own "digi-cash". The "digi-cash" would work simply as IOU's. How to enforce them is a totally diff problem...the idea is basically from the story And then there were none by Eric Frank Russel. An interesting read anyways.
An interesting (If UK specific) figure is that there is about 25 billion pounds in notes and coin but an estimated 800 million pounds in the British economy. (a couple of years old on the figures)
This is mainly due to the fact the bank lends out the money that you deposit (while leaving the notional figure sitting in your account) to somebody else who then redeposits it into another bank account where it can be lent out again.
Money creation at work!
Given the similar economic structures I would imagine that there is a similar ratio and situation in the US and in all other countries with a similar banking system.
This obviously means that banks keep most of your money in electronic form anyway so perhaps the question is 'when will consumers have access to electronic cash' most money is already stored by a computer.
- It should be anonymous. PayPal isn't. Credit cards aren't. So they can create a customer profile of you. Goodbye privacy.
- It should be secure. Credit card numbers can be stolen or faked. An "ideal" system would guarantee security.
- It should be flexible. Most existing anonymous and secure e-cash systems use "tokens" of a fixed value. A good system should be able to handle arbitrary cash values in a flexible way.
Systems that work under these premises do exist. Anonymity and security can be reached by using blind electronic signatures. Flexibility can be reached by using "divisible" e-cash systems. Unfortenately, such schemes are very expensive in terms of computing power (which means, of course, that they are also expensive in terms of transaction costs).And then, of course, there's one important question: Who wants anonymous e-cash? Banks and credit companies probably don't (because they like to have your customer profile). Shops probably don't either (for the same reason). Customers? Well, face the facts: Most customers just don't appreciate the value of privacy. So, there's a simple conclusion: No market, so e-cash. It's as easy as that.
The card can be charged in an ATM machine, or by a small terminal connected to your PC. You simply log in to a webpage and you can transfer money from your checking account into the chip with your PIN code.
Payments on the Internet with this card are also possible.
The system is called 'Proton' in Belgium and 'ChipKnip' in the Netherlands. Some other European countries are using it as well. Check out www.protonworld.com and www.banksys.be
That's where my digital cash falls sometimes. You might also want to check next to the washing machine.
I used to work for a company who designed vending machines, and they were involved in the Mondex scheme.
This was a really exciting idea:
i) Cash was to be carried on smart cards the same size as credit cards. Cash could be moved from the user's bank account to the card, or between individuals, by a range of technologies.
ii) Users would have a wallet, which was a small electronic device, just larger than the card. This let the users view how much cash their card had on it, and also had a simple calculator (doubling as a method of authenticating the owner of the card) with currency conversion built in.
iii) Payments could be made at point of sale by handing the card over and entering a PIN to authorise the cash transaction.
iv) Payments could be made remotely via telephone (this was all pre-WWW) by using special home telephones that had card readers built in. Again, payment authorisation was by PIN.
v) The name and other details of the owner of a particular card were encoded on it, so that lost cards could be returned to banks for sending back to the owners. People who found cards could not use the cash stored on it, or see how much cash was stored on it, and would be given a small reward for returning lost cards.
The scheme was trialled in a reasonably large UK town. Supermarkets and other stores etc. were set up with the infrastructure, people were given cards, wallets and telephones, and instructed to go about their business as normal, but using the digital cash.
Unfortunately, the scheme did not work. People did not understand the central concept behind the idea: Cash is an abstract idea -- it isn't really the coins and bank notes that we pass around -- these are just tokens, and electronic tokens could be used instead. The people of the town thought these cards were just credit cards and didn't understand the fundamental difference.
It is a real shame, as the idea was quite elegant in my opinion, and would have made for a much more secure, interoperable, convenient, private and manageable currency system.
I guess it is the average person's poor education and lack of deep thought about everyday things that scuppers such ideas. As technologists we can think up some truly wonderful, grounbreaking ideas, but in the end we need to convince the regular public about these ideas. But often, the everyday public don't really want to have to think.
"The noble art of losing face will one day save the human race"---Hans Blix
The government never got round to paying him back, by the way. Heard of "the national debt"?
Games Workshop Petition
Digital Cash...credit card...digital cash...credit card...umm someone help me understand why this is not digital cash?
No matter what company does it there is going to be a fee attached. Digital cash is here, and most people have it already. Why make it harder than it is. Next time you buy something on the internet what did you just use to get it? Plastic Cash?
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
By Robert A. Hettinga
Founder, Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism
About 3 years ago, after it was apparent that it was failing, I started thinking about what was wrong with the business model for DigiCash, David Chaum's company for marketing his blind-signature digital cash protocol. Actually, it was the underwriting model that Mark Twain Bank, DigiCash's first customer, was using for their ecash product that struck me as the heart of the problem.
It has become increasingly apparent to me ever since that nobody is paying attention to the way bearer instruments have been issued historically, much less why that model was successful.
The business model below shows how to implement the underwriting of digital bearer financial instruments in light of that long tradition, this time using the new financial cryptographic techniques on a ubiquitous geodesic global internetwork.
Are you kidding? How many hours a day do you sit in traffic? Even if you limit flying cars to a single vertical height, making it essentially a 2D surface, it would be like driving on a big, empty plain to get to work. Can you imagine there being traffic in that situation?
If so... open up several such plains, until it goes away. A flying car would eliminate traffic jams, period.
Doug
Money is just a concept- an idea we use to encourage the exchange of goods and services. As such, it's the easiest thing to BE digital- it can be represented just as well by a string of ones and zeros as it can be by paper with dead guys' faces on it. For all intents and purposes, we've already got digital cash. When I get paid at the end of the week, I get my money direct deposited. I use credit cards to pay for just about everything, and everything else gets paid via electronic transfer (including my credit card bills). In fact, as soon as McDonald's starts taking Mastercard, I'll be done with cash alltogether. I fail to see what possible advantages could be had by simply changing the way our computers see money, when we already have electronic systems in place that work just fine.
No one can hax0r the 20 in my pocket.
Ok. PayPal does not help you if the person you are dealing with doesn't have a PayPal account. If you could go to your PayPal account and create the equivilent of a digital note then you could give that to someone who doesn't have a PayPal account. Then they could give that note to someone else for equivilent goods/services and that person could eventually cash it in. The note could go through a dozen hands before it gets back to PayPal where it is cashed in. This gives you (and the people you deal with), two things that neither bank accounts nor PayPal can offer: anonymity, and freedom.
The fact that you don't know what digital cash is good for re-enforces my post. Digital cash companies need to stop thinking about the technology and start thinking about why, you, the customer with bank accounts and PayPal, need digital cash.
Some people are happy buying everything on their credit/debit card and never touch paper money. This is what buying online is like today. I, personally, prefer the anonymity of cash. Making a claim as to why we need digital cash is just as hard as making a claim as to why we need cash. I think the best possible reason for needing digital cash is the same reason we need cash: small transactions. I don't want to put my name on every tiny transaction I make. I don't want to go through the hastle of getting my bank involved in every small transaction I make. So what do I do? I simply don't make small transactions on the Internet, because there is no cash. I make the claim that without small transactions an economy cannot grow.
How we know is more important than what we know.
One of the schemes I read about involved making a particular "chunk" of money into an actual string of digits. The string actually becomes the money. Therefore, you can actually "fax" the cash.