A further reply to Mr. Robichaux, who I paraphrase, "The more I have problems with the DigiCash beta, the better First Virutal looks." Some problems with this: 1) It is, after all, a Beta Test. Many companies limit participation in such tests quite arbitrarily. Also, remember, DigiCash (to the best of my knowledge) is not going into the digital bank business itself, but rather through licensees. Aside from Paul, who is very PR oriented, it is primarily a group of quite talented young programmers who are, while answering your letters, trying to come out with new versions of the code. 2) A group of us went over the First Virtual stuff in detail last night over fajitas, and were practically rolling on the floor with laughter. Basically they have an attitude of "Crypto is too hard, people won't want to use it." So instead, each transaction consists of an e-mail exchange which is converted ultimately into credit card transactions The exposure time for the merchant is on the order of _90 days_. All fraud, etc., is on the head of the merchant. The bottom line here is that FV has a system which is much more sluggish than the DigiCash system, even though it doesn't use "hard" crypto. It is far from anonymous, and the transactions are trivially reversible. This is actually a _design goal_ in their "Soylent Green", er, "Simple Green" proposed standard. It is completely inappropriate for hard goods of significant value, and its minimum transaction cost is high enough to rule out its applicability for very small transactions. Even if used for purely informational goods, if an undercapitalized info service becomes popular, it will sink beneath the waves while waiting for payment. As near as I can tell, FV's technology was developed by people who wanted to implement their pet philosophy about Internet commerce (customer should examine info first, then commit to paying, all transactions reversible, cryptography and anonymity are bad, secure transactions are not possible on the net, etc.), rather than anything bordering on an Internet cash-like system. So, I ask, First Virtual is looking better and better for doing _what_? Until they deal with the interface problem (get a decent client, rather than relying exclusively on e-mail), I think they're not even going to be adequate for getting shareware-scale proceeds from putting up a cool Web page.