Paul Gillin Editor in Chief Computerworld Dear Paul: The Computerworld article in Online News, 09/17/98 12:16 PM, Bank ends electronic cash trial By Mary Lisbeth D'Amico http://www.computerworld.com/home/news.nsf/all/9809174ecash is a good example of today's low standards in journalistic accuracy. Ms. D'Amico failed utterly to comprehend what Mark Twain Bank's Digicash program was. She wrote: Customers gave the bank their credit-card information only once, then created electronic "coins" at the bank, allowing them to make small purchases -- or micropayments -- of goods over the Internet without having to enter a credit-card number each time. Ms. D'Amico evidently confused the Digicash program with other, dissimilar Internet transaction mechanisms that are substitutes for passing credit card information over the public Internet. In fact, the Digicash program HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CREDIT CARDS OR CREDIT PURCHASES. Is that clear enough? Digicash provided the means to move money on deposit with Mark Twain Bank into an electronic "purse," from which it could be spent with merchants equipped with Digicash software. No credit. No credit cards. No necessarily "small" purchases. Ms. D'Amico's profound leap of misunderstanding misinforms and misleads readers. It also rather completely vacates the presumably explanatory comment she attributes to the Bank's new owner's representative, Beth Fagen: Fagen also cited the changing climate in the U.S. for Internet payments. When the trial was started in 1995, she said, "people were more fearful of using credit cards to pay for things over the Internet. Now that seems to have disappeared." Had Ms. D'Amico understood the nature of Digicash, she may have questioned Ms. Fagen about the apparent non sequitur. If Digicash had nothing to do with making credit transactions "safer," why would decreasing public fear of using credit cards on the Internet have anything to do with Mercantile's decision to abruptly discontinue the Digicash program? The key fact completely overlooked, the one thing that distinguished the Digicash program from all the look-alike credit-card protection schemes, was the anonymity of the purchaser. Ms. D'Amico mentions it in passing as if it were merely a curiosity. In this increasingly fishbowl world, online purchases, particularly of intangibles such as information, are subject to tracking and record keeping that is clearly, demonstrably, becoming a danger to the privacy and well- being of the online public. It is to be expected that products and services such as offered by Digicash will find an increasingly enthusiastic market as the private and governmental abuses of information gathered on line become more widespread and more widely known. Digicash, by the way, was never considered a true "micropayment" system. Micropayment refers to the facility of trivially making and accepting payments as small as 1/100th, even 1/1,000th of one cent. No such systems have yet been fielded, and no credit card system can come anywhere close to the low transaction cost required to permit micropayments for access to Web pages, articles, or the use of minor online services such as HTML verifiers, graphic button builders, etc. It is only a matter of time before such systems become available, and they will likely be both anonymous and unrelated to credit cards. Ms. D'Amico will no doubt report the advent of such systems as yet another advance in the use of credit cards on the Internet. But then, Computerworld is the outfit that used to heavily promote the idea of trade unions for programmers and data entry clerks, the "Certified Data Processor" program, and trumpeted the release of virtual memory by IBM some ten years after it had been fielded by Burroughs Corp. Mitigating that last, the same issue of Computerworld carried a small, back-pages article about Burroughs' virtual memory, with a picture of staff at a B-5000 site celebrating the anniversary with a birthday cake bearing ten candles. Regards, Thomas Junker tjunker@phoenix.net http://www.phoenix.net/~tjunker/wang.html The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center