First known purchase of physical goods with cyberbucks
[Feel free to forward to anywhere you feel is appropriate] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- For some time now, Adam Back has been offering to sell RSA T-shirts for cyberbucks (DigiCash's experimental anonymous digital cash system), but no-one has had enough available to take him up on it. However, thanks to the success of the ecm mailing list (ecm@ai.mit.edu) and WWW site (http://www.c2.org/~mark/ecash/ecash.html), today I finally managed to collect enough c$ to buy one. It was something of a feat to gather that many c$ in one place, as the number of sellers is limited. There are many more buyers than sellers, everyone wants c$, but few people are selling at a realistic price. As it stands, we have managed to take a worthless currency (c$ are not backed with anything) and give it value based solely on what the market is willing to pay for it, due to its security, anonymity and ease of use advantages compared to the other digital payment systems on the Net. Once a DigiCash licensee starts offering to sell (and buy) ecash via VISA/MasterCard and chequing account, I could see ecash getting very popular very quickly. Using ecash once you've got the c$ in your ewallet/DigiCash bank account is near instant. If used through the WWW forms interface as provided by the Windows and X-windows user interface, the transaction is as easy as clicking on a button. Instant buy, much more convenient than filling in credit card forms, talking to people on the phone, sending things in snail mail, etc, and anonymous too. Now you can even use the beta-test currency to buy and sell physical goods as well. Anyway, if anyone knows of an earlier transaction of cyberbucks for physical goods than this (at 15:00 GMT 17th August 1995), then please let me know. Also, if you have c$ that you wish to sell, or have run out and want to buy some more, come along and join in the fun on the WWW site or mailing list... Mark P.S. If anyone in the UK wants to buy a rusty but reliable FIAT X1/9 convertible, it's yours for only 5,000 cyberbucks... (For the record, I have no connection to DigiCash other than as an ecash beta tester, and the ecash market is not supported by them in any way.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6 iQEVAgUBMDN1YFVvaTo9kEQVAQE4Bwf/WYTlYShkIyP0jOLyDmOpG/Bzdya5q+Xp QY60CS8Po/cSIEPy26cDs62Yn5HIEq0g+afw0NZS4BiH2xanqDFnwrumNE78q2iW 03AlX/RuDkGFabpxUfFoYRkf2qgsDI1wnt7vzryKlxgBSGzoEGS7j7UKesEtASIl 3iw3EgINnX+BN7nSWsLcpyN3BHUPKxLSKWUg/hduS7D8AlVqMFq8JUu2wDKxJwJV 1FJ5oN8dF5bSa+VQINA4LXK9Nx/DVqMGAedg37E3/CGuassGBfW1YtTiRwauaj6q cV7D2zg52hvoq7qeQdesWHLUeqBbK9U/7Xbb80SP87eny+1XkIsgig== =M1jD -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Thu, 17 Aug 1995, Rev. Mark Grant wrote:
[Feel free to forward to anywhere you feel is appropriate]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
For some time now, Adam Back has been offering to sell RSA T-shirts for cyberbucks (DigiCash's experimental anonymous digital cash system), but no-one has had enough available to take him up on it. However, thanks to the success of the ecm mailing list (ecm@ai.mit.edu) and WWW site (http://www.c2.org/~mark/ecash/ecash.html), today I finally managed to collect enough c$ to buy one.
I just had a wicked thought. What happens when people combine challenge key cracking with e-cash? Lesse -- 2^40 keys = 1,099,511,627,776 keys. Damien was able to get 850000-1.3 million keys per second. Let's go for the low-end and use 8000 keys per second which is in the range of his sparcstations (a very common machine on the internet). We "only" need 38,178 machines to crack the key in 8 hours. Each of those workstations is going to test 28,800,000 keys and we'll assign a nominal value of $1,000 to cracking the key. (Most people have $1k of room on their visa or m/c, no?) Splitting the booty 50/50 gives someone $500 or about 1.79 e-cents per 100k keys tested. So, could 38,000 people be enticed into running a sparc-cycle cracking daemon for a 1 in 38,000 chance at $500? :-)
participants (2)
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David Neal -
Rev. Mark Grant