A few days ago I got my ecash account set up with the Mark Twain bank. Presently only one merchant is officially listed at <URL: http://www.marktwain.com/shops.html>, Delorie Software. As I understand it, only people with merchant accounts are eligible to be listed here. However, you don't have to have a merchant account to receive ecash or to set up shop software. If anyone else has set up a shop to receive Mark Twain ecash using a user account, perhaps they could post here and we could keep a list of unofficial vendors. The other thing I wanted to write about is ecash speed. One idea people have had is to use ecash for micropayments, such as one cent to read a web page. The question is, is the current ecash software sufficiently fast for this? Maybe someone could set up a site using either Twain ecash or DigiCash ecash which actually charged you a penny for each page you browsed around. It would be interesting to see how much of an obstacle it presents in browsing the web. The impression I've had from the few times I've used ecash is that in fact it does slow things down way too much for this to be practical. But it would be good to actually do the experiment. One reason I was thinking about this is reading a new paper by Rivest and Shamir, <URL:http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/RivestShamir-mpay.ps>. It is about a couple of proposed systems for micropayments, specifically oriented towards the penny-per-web-page model. They are offline systems, designed so that a minimum of calculation is done by the vendor, user and bank. So they should be very efficient. However, the big problem is that they are not anonymous. The cash tokens are recognizable by the bank when spent tokens are sent in by the vendors - the bank knows who spent them. Maybe for penny level transactions that is not a big deal, although if for-pay web browsing becomes common then it does seem like it would present a privacy threat. Every web site you visit (not the specific pages, but the overall site names) would be known by the bank - quite a significant piece of marketing data. The point is that if the anonymity afforded by ecash is too costly in terms of time, then we may end up stuck with a non-anonymous system simply because that is the only one efficient enough to work. It would be good to find out if that is a serious problem. Hal Finney