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paul@poboy.b17c.ingr.com (Paul Robichaux) writes: [digicash stuff...] At some point I am going to have to take a look at my NDA with Digicash again and see how much I can say about the reality of some of these things...
I've asked them to say something. The best I could get out of Paul Dineissen is that they're talking with banks. Well, duh. The _present_ reality is that I can sell things ** and get paid ** if I use First Virtual, but not if I use ecash.
As others have pointed out, network bandwidth and processing CPU are cheap enough to allow multiple banks to communicate cleanly. Real banks already understand how to do this.
Wanna bet? You should get into a clearing discussion with Eric sometime (I think that the clearing issue must be one of his favorite things in the world as he has so much to say about it :) Clearing is not only non-trivial, it can be downright ugly. A small system is not incredibly difficult to set up, but a nationwide or global system would be something that would give scores of engineers and designers nightmares for years to come. Things are easy when you talk about your $50 Visa purchase or check, but when you start to deal with clearing big aggregate sums through banks things get real nasty very quickly.
Why clear big aggregate sums? Why not just clear smaller ones? Hell, why not use a forwarding engine that just says "this cash came from bank X" and sends it along? I'm sure that the design of a robust, usable system is nontrivial, and I don't mean to imply that it is. I just don't believe that a tool the size of Fedwire and the existing bank architectures are, or will be, required. - -Paul - -- Paul Robichaux, KD4JZG | Good software engineering doesn't reduce the perobich@ingr.com | amount of work you put into a product; it just Not speaking for Intergraph. | redistributes it differently. ### http://www.intergraph.com ### -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBLt5Hxqfb4pLe9tolAQGA0gQAgd8BcSVu199NjEx3uMq4/ZrtaRA34z/g X/VOMOIfUOuftj2wIiF5iVM5CMOoxMUz4J3gPESIOjZnVEtDUsfsD5aCtTuJW+39 Dmmjkm1nlTynDag7A0tsW39AfqGCpWy4gqcgwhHrvUvKt2Tts/XkvFwkT/wjLM0f 3reNbfPMSZY= =y4mZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----