DNS indicated that this organization does in fact have one site, mary.iia.org. Even so, this is not enough for me to trust them with my credit line. This conclusion may apply to many other, more legitimate-looking operations that spring up in the near future. This demonstrates that privacy is only one reason to go to digital cash; the biggest reason may be the massive fraud commonplace in the current electronic system. Online billing is moving towards this incredibly insecure system where our $multi-thousand credit lines are exposed by giving out their short "keys" to numerous unknown entities. Nick Szabo szabo@netcom.com You raise an interesting point; however, it's far from clear that digital cash is a solution. In fact, it may even be a negative factor in some contexts. Let's look at why some vendors -- whether of network services, hotel rooms, or rental cars -- much prefer credit cards, even though the card issuer will charge them a few percent off the top. The answer is that in these cases, customers have the potential to run up a large bill -- that is, a debt -- between interactions with the provider. Furthermore, this debt is often legitimate, i.e., the customer really did consume that amount of service. A vendor possessing a credit card number *will* be paid, with minimum hassle. If the customer skips town, the card issuer eats the charge. But that's part of their cost of doing business, which they try to minimize via things like credit checks. If credit cards didn't exist, the vendor would have to assume the risk. Most are not nearly as large as the card issuers, and they don't have the lead time to do a credit check in many cases. Their usual answer is to demand a deposit. That's fine with either regular cash or digital cash -- but if and only if you can afford that kind of capital outlay. And those deposits are often very large compared to the final actual bill, because the vendor wants to cover the larger potential bill (i.e., a wrecked car). I suppose one could invent a deposit broker, who took a few percent to cover the short-term loan of (perhaps) large sums, and who issued digital cash tokens. But there's one more important point to consider: U.S. law on disputed credit card purchases. Suppose that this organization really is fraudulent (though the evidence for that varies between slim and none, and the person who sent the original note may be headed for a libel suit). The customer isn't liable for the bill, subject to assorted restrictions and caveats. The card issuer has to eat that, too -- and it's up to them to try to collect from the offending merchant. Why send cash -- digital or otherwise -- to a potentially-disreputable organization, when you can protect yourself quite easily? Digital cash solves some problems very nicely -- but I don't think this is one of them. --Steve Bellovin