On 2003-07-23, Sunder uttered:
If you want to do electronic payments that are non-anonymous you can simply use a credit card or debit card (or something like paypal, egold), or for larger quanitities you can do wire transfers - so why would we need yet another a non-anonymous "cash" that isn't cash?
I only objected to the notion that all digicash needs to be anonymous in order to be desirable. I didn't say this particular system amounts to desirable weak digicash. To that end it would likely make far more sense in the short term e.g. to marry Visa Electronic to PayPal. In the long term multiple cooperating PayPal-like entities could then be used to build mixnets, making the digicash strongly anonymous. As for Morlock Elloi's objection, what you have on your bank account *is* money, and debit cards simply a technological quirk which allows us to access it. Furthermore, any medium of indirect exchange is by definition money and at least Merriam-Webster defines cash as "ready money". So we might define cash as the most liquid form a money available. After that we can claim that in the presence of ubiquitous debit capability and a steadily growing aversion towards those using paper money, the latter is not in fact cash at all, but a less liquid cash (bits on a mainframe) substitute used when we're willing to pay a premium (in convenience and depreciation) for anonymity. -- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2