The only way to preserve the market would appear to be providing an ecash-for-ecash exchange with a new bank, presumably a licensee of the Digicash software. Such a bank could, out of little more than good will and a desire to kick-start a new e-currency, offer to exchange c$ for the new ecash. Or, perhaps we just shrug our shoulders, kiss our hardly-earned Cyberbuck goodbye, and mumble about how it was fun while it lasted.
Well I might be interested in setting up such a scheme, but I'm not sure that the Chaumian Annonymity guarantees could be provided as is. This is because of Chaum's patent on blind signatures. There are schemes which offer weaker annonymity and also schemes which provide for faster movement of currency. The scheme I am currently looking at employs both symmetric and asymmetric keying to provide for fast transfers of cash after a connection is set up. The mode of payment is of the fraction of cents per page type so RSA is too expensive. Who would be interested in such a trial? Who would be interested in writing code? There are complications if the Web consortium is involved since we are obliged to provide code to our members one month in advance of the official release. But that is for source I beleive, I don't think that there would be a problem with trial users or with exchanging code with collaborators. After the one month period all consortium code becomes copyright but freely avaliable for use for any purpose, its the X consortium contract in fact. Cyberbucks could be siphoned out of the Chaum system by simply agreeing to exchange e-cash for whatever the new currency is. It would also be possible to go in the other direction perhaps, "I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of one cyberbuck". Since most cyberbuck users are looking to control access to a resource its not clear that the cyberbuck model is what is needed. It might be possible to deploy a resource contention arbitration mechanism which was not convertible. This would also avoid many of the regulatory problems of e-cash. Phill