Jim McCoy says:
We want to be the ones who will define the protocol for currency on the net. [...] We are staring small and have no real plans on becoming future banking powerhouses (The Gnomes of Austin perhaps... :) but we would rather it be us who define the standard than Chase Manhattan or the US Government.
I don't care for the Government, but I suspect that Chase Manhattan has a much better idea of the problems involved in cash transfer and accounting systems than you guys do. People who've never worked for financial institutions rarely understand where the real problems are. I don't mean this to be patronizing -- I have a good deal of respect for the smarts of people like Eric Hughes -- but its simply the truth. I remember the first time I did some research into back office systems and discovered where the real expenses at an institution were -- and nearly fell over in shock. Real world bank people have to worry about things like how to make sure that exceptional cases involving manual intervention (which represent well over 95% of expense) are minimized, they worry about auditing and making sure that systems are structured in such a way as to avoid constructing the capacity to embezzle into the system. They have to worry about downtime, clearing regulations, imaging documents, and other gunk. I say gunk because its all largely unglamorous in the same way that 99% of mechanical engineering is now both unglamorous and yet still critical to the safety of, say, automobiles. Doing these all right are skills which I have gained a good deal of respect for over the years. A bunch of hackers with experience in nothing but cryptography might get some of the privacy aspects right at the expense of producing a system which is otherwise unworkable. I wish you luck, but I want to warn you in advance that there is a good reason that computer people doing design work at banking institutions are usually a rare breed that get paid six figure salaries. If you set out to do this, it isn't going to be a part time job, and it isn't going to be something you can do without a good deal of expertise, either learned the hard way or hired. Perry