There's an outfit called NetBank, which is selling e-cash-like *certificate numbers*,
8 digit numbers only. No internal checksums or verification. Merchants must send an email message to verify that the money is previously unspent and receive fresh bills.
It's extremely ungainly, and it looks userous too, to the extent that they charge 20% (each way?) to cash you in and out. I hoovered out all the stuff in their infobot (netbank-info@agents.com).
Bob Hettinga
Agree about ungainliness. They aren't yet set-up with PGP or PEM, although they say they are looking into it, so they currently suggest that if you want to send encrypted mail, that you generate a key to be XOR'd with all messages to and from. They do provide the C code for the encryption, though ;)
From reading all of the info from the above infobot, it looks like they only charge the 20% once, to the merchant when he tries to redeem e-certificates for $USD, which they will pay out at the end of each month. They claim in their docs that the 20% is the cost of their 900 number service, so I suppose their business plan is to make money on the float, since they are not charging transaction fees for making change, verifying e-cash, etc.
If they accepted credit cards they might be in much better shape. I would much rather see real Chaum-style electronic money, but have not yet received a response after signing up for their beta test. I wonder if NetBank's style of serialized e-certificates provide the 75% of the functionality that most people need to ignore better alternatives, especially if, as with Pr0duct Cypher's money, their is a big learning curve to go up before they can use it. Any pointers to other near-term e-cash systems? I am very interested in setting this up for relatively small transactions (<$50) in the not-to-distant future. Thanks for info. -- Benjamin McLemore <analyst@onramp.net>