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First of all, digital money can take various forms. Existence on a hard drive is one of those forms. But, it is also possible to have digital money on a card-based platform. Mondex in the UK currently has official government units of account digitally represented for their Mondex card trial in Swindon. They have also announced that in the future this card will hold up to five "official" currencies. Furthermore, they make no secret about the fact that this digital money is ideally suited to transfer on the Net. Visa and Mastercard are both working on stored-value cards which will also digitize official currencies. CyberCash has also announced plans for an electronic token which will most likely represent an official currency. Others will announce soon.

I'd like to go on record as stating that all of these other systems pretty much suck. Mondex, for example, actually stores non-crypto messages of the type "Hi there I represent one hundred Belgian crowns" in its cards, so if you can hack the "front-door" security (possibly with physical hacking of the card) and convince a Mondex card that your PC is another Mondex card you can transfer infinite money to it. (Well, I suppose you wouldn't be able to transfer more than 2^64 units of currency or some such limit, but you get the idea.) Contrast this with DigiCash's scheme in which each cyberbuck is cryptographically unforgeable. Most of the other companies have similarly weak security. Many of them are not offering any new technology at all, but are simply offering to transport your credit card number for you, encrypted, over the net. Furthermore none of DigiCash's competitors, as far as I have been able to learn, offer any kind of anonymity the way DigiCash does. The closest they come is "confidentiality". Yeah-- right. I can get the same offer from the Ministry of Truth. Finally, be aware that e-cash can be put onto a smart card just as well as on a magentic disk. DigiCash is actually in the process of developing and/or marketing smart cards that hold such things as toll token for toll roads and civic credits for coffee houses in Europe. See their home page for more detailed (and probably more accurate) info. Source of facts behind these opinions: Perusing the web pages of the principals. DigiCash home page http://www.digicash.com/ FIRST VIRTUAL Holdings Incorporated http://www.fv.com/ Mondex Home Page http://www.mondex.com/mondex/home.htm CyberCash, Inc. Home Page http://www.cybercash.com/ CommerceNet Home http://www.commerce.net/ RSA Data Security, Inc.'s Home Page http://www.rsa.com/ Net1 Home Page http://www.netchex.com/ Electronic Commerce http://www.zurich.ibm.ch/Technology/Security/extern/ecommerce/ The NetCheque(SM) system http://nii-server.isi.edu:80/info/NetCheque/ NetMarket Homepage http://netmarket.com/nm/pages/home Downtown Anywhere - Front Street http://www.awa.com/ Internet Shopping Network http://www.internet.net/ Cash, Tokens, etc on NII http://www.cnri.reston.va.us:3000/XIWT/documents/dig_cash_doc/ToC.html NetBill Project Home Page http://www.ini.cmu.edu/netbill/ NetMarket Homepage http://netmarket.com/nm/pages/home NexusBucks http://www.c2.org/nexbucks/ Economics and the Internet http://gopher.econ.lsa.umich.edu/EconInternet.html Security First Network Bank, FSB http://www.sfnb.com/ Commerce on the Internet http://home.netscape.com/newsref/std/credit.html A History of Money http://www.ex.ac.uk/~RDavies/arian/llyfr.html Wenbo Mao's Presentation http://www.hpl.hp.co.uk/projects/vishnu/main.html Internet Casinos http://www.casino.org/" ADD_DATE="801367759 The E-cash Market http://www.c2.org/~mark/ecash/ecash.html

Stand-by though: governments and central banks will do everything in their power to discourage and prevent this for the power to issue and coin money is one of THE most cherished privileges of the Crown !

...and it seems like the first step that they are taking is sanctioning inferior, less secure, privacy-decreasing technologies over DigiCash's superior alternative. And so it goes... Bryce signatures follow:  + public key on keyservers /. island Life in a chaos sea or via finger 0x617c6db9 / bryce.wilcox@colorado.edu ---* -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Auto-signed with Bryce's Auto-PGP v1.0beta iQCVAwUBMC+gSPWZSllhfG25AQHe+gQAhiPQ8GN+cg4Q6lLe6c8UQovOVN301lop tAthnw7qbLDY/dKItCy9AzImDGn2WFTwx3i+nouWbDSWwGUw0Zlc6ajdRlCviX9a BihtvGJaaujxv13ERI6jjmmfkvbctDfqUrDvrgjQB/0kOhSxt5VTkA2tNdzGiEK9 4EA3f+0Cah0= =cJy2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----