At 10:52 PM 7/20/94 -0400, Duncan Frissell wrote:
"Don't bother. Take out the check you were going to send me, read me the routing code and check number on the bottom. Give me your name and address and the bank's name and address as they appear on the check, the amount you will pay and the date. I'll collect that check electronically without you having to bother to send it."
This is exactly the problem we're having with identifying a market for digital cash. There's no unique selling proposition besides privacy. There are too many real good substitutes, like this one for checks. E-mail with the above information in it can be encrypted and signed, and would be secure enough to make a real good check in its own right. This is like my favorite quote (in InforWorld) about Macs: "It seems that 85% of the market will settle for 75% of a Macintosh."
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.