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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."
e-gold is still going strong. Just like in Cryptonomicon, only without quite so many stupendous badasses.
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?
What does this digital money do that my regular money doesn't?
Excellent question. Banks are considered safe because they're insured by the FDIC, and because they've got a really good track record. Not to mention that it's just empirically hard to rob a bank. Credit, usually being an extension of a bank, is also very secure. People have problems with their credit accounts all the time, but that's nothing new, and there are well-established procedures for working out those problems.
I have a couple of cards in my wallet, and with them I can buy just about any product or service in real life, over the phone, or on the Internet. For managing my actual physical money, I log on to my bank's web site. As far as I'm concerned, "digital cash" is here.
I write in my journal
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.
Niven wrote an essay once called, "Yet Another Modest Proposal." It's collected in one or another of his books; I believe it's in my copy of All the Myriad Ways. In it, he pitched the idea of putting US currency on the uranium standard. Coins would be made of actual radioactive uranium, in concentrations proportional to their value.
The benefits would be legion. Counterfeiting would become a crime of the past, because anybody with a Geiger counter could tell if your scratch was genuine. And what better way to keep the economy going than to encourage the circulation of money?
Lends a whole new meaning to the phrase, "burning a hole in your pocket."
I write in my journal
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.
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
see
(this is just the cardinal example- other people have come up with other ways of providing offline
but you can't implement it till 2005: