At 15:52 9/22/2000 -0400, R. A. Hettinga forwarded:
At the EFF end-of-RSA ball in SF last night David Chaum stood up and said a few enigmatic words [...]
Well, I wasn't there -- we still were recovering from our own east coast bash the day before... But here's some stuff (below) that might be interesting. First, an article that appeared in the September 20, 2000 issue of American Banker. You'll recall that circa May 1999, Drew Hyatt and other folks bought the 16 patents from Digicash/Chaum and formed eCash Technologies. Excerpt from article:
Back when Digicash Inc. was trying to sell its eCash electronic payment products to U.S. banks, there were few takers.
But now the products are being offered by eCash Technologies Inc., which has struck at least one noteworthy deal: Metavante Corp., the technology subsidiary of Marshall & Ilsley Corp., has agreed to integrate the products into its transaction processing system.
Metavante said it could not discuss the deal because it is in a "quiet period" related to an initial public offering. The company, which provides data processing services for 700 banks, will begin by offering its members eCash's Monneta Debit software, which allows consumers to shop or send money online without exposing their actual debit card numbers. [...] eCash Technologies is marketing the electronic payment products under the name Monneta. The company is touting the Monneta suite -- which includes debit, prepaid, business-to-business, and person-to-person payment products -- as an anonymous way to make online payments. It uses a blind signature system, which means that customers can send money to one another through e-mail, or buy from any online merchant site, without revealing their identities.
Joseph Nocera, editor-at-large at Fortune, is a smart fellow and a good interviewer. I know him from when I was also at Time Inc. He wrote in the August 2000 issue of Money magazine:
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.
-Declan
Bob forwards:
At the EFF end-of-RSA ball in SF last night David Chaum stood up and said a few enigmatic words: "Great to be here, and what's really important now is that we all come together and have a common approach. I've looked at the old ecash and, (wry smile) there were a few problems. But I've got some ideas about how to fix it and make it available in a way which avoids the kind of wars we've had in the past. I had wanted to make more of an announcement tonight, but the legal stuff is (as always) taking longer than I'd anticipated. So, thank you." [applause]
Pretty interesting. I wonder if he has an interesting new patent unencumbered way to do ecash, and if he's going to make it patent free. Chaum, Brands and now Chaum II. All speculation, of course, but that'd be a real interesting shake-out of the ecash patent minefield, and much kudos would be afford Dr Chaum who currently gets perhaps more blame than fair for DigiCash burn out. Perhaps a protocol by him, with his patent background, might get more attention than Wagner et al's pk MAC + ZKP of non-coin marking, if he could organise some physical entity around it. Did anyone who was there get a better idea of what Dr Chaum is up to? Actually if (1) is really patent unencumbered, what it needs is some organisation (a suggestion Bob) to provide demos, business presentations and offer suit friendly support and legal interpretations of the protocol's patent unemcumberedness, and it could perhaps itself compete head on with Chaum I patents now held by ECashTechnologies, and to some extent with Brands/Zero-Knowledge. You've got to provide suits something to hold onto in the physical world -- they really want to part with money, so you've got to construct something to sell them a license to: a software library, technical support from your collection of cryptographers or something, anything that allows them to feel corporately assured. ECashRumorMonger
At 5:37 AM +0000 on 9/23/00, Anonymous wrote:
what it needs is some organisation (a suggestion Bob) to provide demos, business presentations and offer suit friendly support and legal interpretations of the protocol's patent unemcumberedness,
Suggestion noted about a year and a half ago. :-). See the url in my .sig, below, which is *slowly* accreting new(er) stuff besides the pretty boat picture...
and it could perhaps itself compete head on with Chaum I patents now held by ECashTechnologies, and to some extent with Brands/Zero-Knowledge.
As an actual financial intermediary, IBUC would rather licence than compete, thank you very much. :-). In the meantime, some interesting stuff is afoot. Some of it can even be made public pretty soon, I think... Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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
participants (4)
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Anonymous -
Bram Cohen -
Declan McCullagh -
R. A. Hettinga