At 4:24 PM 8/19/94 -0700, Eric Hughes wrote:
The withdrawal transaction posts a debit to a customers demand deposit account (decreasing it) and a credit to the suspension account (increasing it).
NewJargonNotice("suspension account") Is this new nomenclature? It sounds less risque than "float", I must say...
Where digital cash is immediately useful is online as a retail level wire transfer system. [snip] the cost of networking is dropping and the cost of computation is dropping. I personally don't expect that off-line digital cash techniques will ever actually be economically most efficient. Existing alternates (e.g. credit cards) work well enough today, and by the time PDA's work well enough and are cheap enough to be universal, the cost of an online verification will be down in the fractions of a cent.
Immediate and final clearing must save money, somehow, but right now, it's hard to prove whether cash is still king in cyberspace. I have a (somewhat religious, in the sense that it may not be empirically proved in my lifetime) belief that that's the case. That's why I like to agitate for a test. Yes, Tim, I know, you guys aren't bankers... Cheers, Bob Hettinga ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com) "There is no difference between someone Shipwright Development Corporation who eats too little and sees Heaven and 44 Farquhar Street someone who drinks too much and sees Boston, MA 02331 USA snakes." -- Bertrand Russell (617) 323-7923