On Sat, 23 Sep 2000, Declan McCullagh wrote:
But of course someone did think of it before. He was just too far ahead of his time. When I spoke to Chaum recently, he professed to have "burned out" trying to make Digicash work. He had sold its patents to another company and was no longer paying close attention to the business.
He did tell me about a few of his more recent breakthroughs, however. One was called Digilock. "You take an ordinary key," he explained, "and put it in an ordinary lock, and it looks it up in a database and says whether the key is okay or not. It makes it possible for a person to have one key for everything." Yeah, I know: It sounds a little far out. But then, I used to think e-cash sounded pretty far out too.
Thank you Tom Wu for already inventing SRP so no other joker can patent it. -Bram Cohen