-- James A. Donald:
There have been many attempts at ecash, but I am not aware of any products involving useful, spendable, convenient, anonymous ecash targeted at that or similar markets [immoral or illegal]. The only really usable anonymous ecash was that of the Mark Twain bank, which crippled its cash to prevent it from being used by that market.
At 01:14 AM 12/4/2000 -0500, Adam Back wrote:
I think the thing that killed MT / digicash for this application was MT at the time was reported to be closing accounts related to pornography -- they apparently didn't want the reputation for providing payment mechanisms for the porn industry or something.
Payee traceability made it possible to close accounts related to pornography. Ecash is not truly cash like if the issuer can prevent it from being used by tax evaders, child pornographers, money launderers and terrorists.
I'd have thought the thing to do was put an ecash client in Mozilla and work on getting it into netscape. Plus download plugins for Internet Explorer.
Internet explorer already has the necessary hooks. If we put the ecash wallet into an active X control then when the user navigates to a ecash page, the user will see the usual warning "Do you trust code signed by so and so". If he clicks yes, the code will be downloaded to the client and installed behind the scenes, and he will never see that warning again, unless he encounters a page with an updated version of the ecash control.
So whoever develops enough clue, capability and interest in making money to do this someday needs to think about making it work with existing credit card sites.
The html code on the thumbnail page where one clicks on a porno link will need to be rewritten to support ecash. If the porno page server is using IIS, the server will need an ISAPI extension to handle URL's containing ecash payments. Apache has a similar extension mechanism, but I have never written an extension for an Apache server. The page that has for-pay links does not need anything unusual about its server, or about the client's Internet explorer, but the server that serves links containing ecoins in their urls will need an extension, similar to extensions I have written before.
Try to make it as painless and instant as possible to buy ecash.
Unfortunately, if ecash is truly untraceable, you cannot give people their ecash until their payment clears, which means you cannot let them pay by credit card. They would be able to pay by e-gold, Paypal, paper cheque or wire transfer. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG x0aQgxEwqS2LNXHW/WBr5lXjkd0JE6+AaYOr2dkP 474TkCMxTMOHpLrXcZYopVPpq36AognlIJ/uEvK0D