Eric Hughes writes
It seems that you have information that is not in the press release you include, which talks (as far as I can tell) about catalog purchases with credit cards.
Only what is in the news and stuff. In the cover story of May 11 Computer currents, page 40 Box, Malone and Davidow say that the money enabled Mosaic will be available in the fall (press release says September - I do not believe either of them) and that what we would call a server program (accounting and ordering package) will cost around 10 000 dollars. Obviously their model is the TV shopping channer, whereas the model we want to see implemented is the middle eastern bazaar, with giving and receiving money equally convenient for both parties. My comments were my interpretation of the press release. My interpretation may be misleading or inaccurate. The press release is probably misleading and inaccurate. If someone would get the real info from EIT, I would be interested to hear it. In particular, now that PGP is US legal, are they going to support PGP in mosaic? (They were not going to at the time of the press release)
Enterprise Integration Technologies and friends will enable digital money transactions in Mosaic in September
Is this announced?
Read the press release "EIT will make Secure NCSA Mosaic software available at no charge to CommerceNet members in September and NCSA will incorporate these securefeatures in future NCSA Mosaic releases. Enterprise Integration Technologies Corp., of Palo Alto, (EIT), is an R&D and consulting organization, developing software and services that help companies do business on the Internet. EIT is also project manager of CommerceNet. "
The transaction model has a crippled mode for people outside the US and Canada
Crippled?
Read the press release "Cryptosystem and signature system interoperation is particularly useful between U.S. residents and non-U.S. residents, where the non-U.S. residents may have to use weaker 40-bit keys in conjunction with RSA's RC2 and RC4 variable keysize ciphers. EIT intends to publish Secure-HTTP as an Internet standard, and work with others in the WWW community to create a standard that will encourage using the Web for a wide variety of commercial transactions. " The biggest crippling is that they do not mention supporting PGP. If Mosaic supports PEM, then PEM will win. But PEM is useless. An evil NSA plot? Naw, they have not got the brains. More likely coorporate stupidity.
They intend that you will be able to write contracts and internet checks on participating banks.
Will the recipient of the check be required to be at a participating bank?
I have no idea, but that would seem to be the only way that it could work, but since I screwed up big in my comments on magic money, other folk may well be more imaginative than I am.
And you can already write contracts with existing digital signatures. A contract is just an agreement between two parties; intermediation is not required.
Quite so. But your typical businessman will not use PGP because it is user hostile, whereas Mosaic is not. The objective is to bring encryptation to the massess. Obviously I would vastly prefer to see PGP integrated into mosaic, I have considered doing this myself, but it is a substantial job with legal hazards, and I am bone lazy and vulnerable to court judgments
For this reason I think decentralized account based digital money is the best hope.
Account based money is identity based money, even if the identity is a pseudo-identity. The whole point of cryptocash protocols is to separate the link between two account by mediating the transaction with some instrument.
Quite so, as I have been reminded. But regrettably it seems likely that identity based money represents less of a jump from the existing system, therefore is likely be considerably more acceptable to the great unwashed masses. Crypto cash - money based on digital tokens - is rather subtle for the masses. Even I screw up. How do you expect the chairman of the board to comprehend it? To successfully push crypto cash, we would need to make it a lot more convenient. Hint. PGP is *not* convenient. A utility that would make crypto cash acceptable, would probably have to simulate account based money, and would need a relational database built into it. Microsoft visual basic, professional edition, allows one to make products that employ and create a relational database, and give those products away. The database built into the freely redistributable Visual Basic run time modules supports SQL. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves and our James A. Donald | property, because of the kind of animals that we | are. True law derives from this right, not from jamesd@netcom.com | the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.