-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- How is the budding digital cash economy going? How many coins are in circulation, and how many transactions are taking place per day? Are people just playing around, or are they exchanging things or services of genuine value? What's the address of the DigiFrank server, and where's it's key? Recently I posted a functional spec for an automatic Magic Money client. Nobody said anything about it. Does this mean that (a) it was good, or (b) nobody cares? If you would have a use for this, please post and tell me what you want it to do. For a robust digital cash economy to develop, we will need multiple servers. In fact, lots of them. We need a currency exchange, preferably third-party (i.e. not a server operator) and for-profit. To use digital cash safely, if servers are going to be run by arbitrary people, you would have to hold many different currencies. This way if one server goes bust (inflates its currency, gets its secret key stolen, ...) you have not lost too much. That means we need Magic Money 2.0. It needs to handle multiple currencies transparently. You should be able to list your holdings of all currencies, and the program should be able to track currency rates. A special message format would allow a currency exchange to update the values stored in the client automatically, just as the server can update the elist automatically. I'm looking for design suggestions (and volunteers to code parts of it!) One point I'm not sure on is: should you be able to pay out multiple currencies in one payment? It could be done as long as a server-id field was added to the coins.dat file. The problem is that when you go to exchange those coins, the client would have to generate multiple messages, each for a different server, and then you would have to mail each one to the correct server. Is the complication worth it? How about a command-line option to put the address of each server before its message? Then those with direct net access could use a script to do all the mailing for them. If PGP 2.6 comes out and becomes a de-facto standard, I will probably update PGP Tools to support both formats. I might even write a patent-safe PGP Tools which only does the 2.6 format and calls RSAREF (ugggh). But if I do there will also be an MPILIB-based version which supports both. Pr0duct Cypher -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLeBnp8GoFIWXVYodAQGeYAQAoqquLcWcWRF8QNWP4mAY2qF0gYiBH3h7 WPAXIfp4niDtNwOvvLZ5iJQwjY88cuSm/LCqSWSSK4FPifm4M0wrUeWNnzXdzmLe g4IMGNzrup8Xx38REiVxU8wDSht15/GYbBV4Co57EXBoSBqaCylezSCnHnGsn4nM nGblnRjmPQ8= =GfG2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----