...

also, my question about whether one loses the downloaded Chaumian bucks if one's hard drive crashes was answered in the affirmative by Levy.

But as I said, if the drive is backed up you don't lose it. It's my understanding this is the case with the current Digicash/Twain bucks. But not necessarily with all implementations.

This "lose your money" with digital cash really does seem to get to people. I always point out that when you take $ out of an ATM machine, you don't expect to get it back if you lose it. For those forms of e-money that are irretrevable when lost users are warned not to download huge amounts.

Question: will people's worries about losing their e-money lead them to accept a higher degree of tracibility as a tradeoff?

I have a question about Digicash that I haven't seen addressed. I've participated in the beta test but have to admit I didn't use it with great frequency. I only downloaded $10 at a time. What surprised me was that one time I was informed that the money I had downloaded had expired. I was able to go back and pick up more but am perplexed with what happenned in that case. Does digicash actually age and disappear if not used soon enough? -Steve Bryan