pretty steep for someone wanting to spend $.10 on something.) My understanding is that the _bank account_ is FDIC insured, but not the ECash. I could be wrong -- their materials are extremely confusing and hard to follow.

My understanding is that the accounts are "WorldCurrency Access" accounts-- which appear to be Money Market funds, which can be denominated in one of 25 currencies. (Ecash-linked accounts must be denominated in dollars.) Being a money market fund, a positive return is -not- guaranteed, and it is not FDIC insured. It is an "investment" account, not a "savings" account. (That is my understanding, which could very well be flawed.) Does anyone understand their non-merchant pricing structure? It had me very confused. Also, what is the difference between a merchant and a non-merchant. I saw nothing on the pages describing that. Suppose Community ConneXion wanted to accept ecash. Could we get a non-merchant account?

As one of my co-workers said today, "It will be interesting to sit back and watch them take regulatory mortar fire." Indeed.

I'm really hoping that they pull their act together -- I've already sent in my account application -- but things look really grim at the moment. There are certainly a lot of projects list members are working on that would be greatly enhanced by functioning, popular e-cash. I encourage everyone to give them lots of helpful feedback so that they can turn this around.

On another note, I'm hoping that some of you will also bite the bullet, get accounts, and join me attempting to win valuable prizes in Sameer's "Hack Digicash" promotion. I'd rather see one of us find holes in this than see the whole thing melt into the ground.

This extremely unprofessional, bungled launch does, I admit, make Mondex (with scads of beautiful marketing literature) look better all the time, although based on some conversations on Sunday, it appears that they may have _extremely serious_ architectural security problems. We'll see how things play out.

Later,

Doug

...

With the release of digicash I hope that we can soon make this stuff for-pay and much of the spam problem will be fixed. (Not all of it, of course.) (I am rather hesitatnt to setup an account with Mark Twain though.. $2,500 min balance and not FDIC insured?)

-- sameer Voice: 510-601-9777 Community ConneXion FAX: 510-601-9734 The Internet Privacy Provider Dialin: 510-658-6376 http://www.c2.org (or login as "guest") sameer@c2.org