At 11:38 AM 7/21/94 -0400, solman@MIT.EDU wrote:
The selling point for digital cash is that it has a low transaction cost and can easily be used for extremelly small transactions. If agent A and agent B want to do business without bothering their owners, you had better have some robust digicash.
I've made this claim myself here before. It's possible you're in a position to verify it. Can you?
Not yet. But I'm just a few weeks away from Alpha testing a very large web-based project which has all sorts of agents interacting with each other and dealing in very small amounts of money. It includes a second rate (but effective) digital cash protocol. When I'm done (which will be very soon), I'll post the code here so everybody can tell me what's wrong. I am presently attempting to upgrade the digital cash to a new method that I've devised (using other people's demonstratedly secure primatives of course). That's why I joined this list recently. I am sure of two things: A) To extract the greatest possible value from human time, it is necessary so set up a complex infrastructure of agents that can abstract tasks whenever possible. and B) A system like this can not exist without a method of dealing with extremelly small monetary transactions. If my confidence is not misplaced, digital cash is simply required by the digital future. JWS