So, it appears (at least to me and many others) that Mondex is the most likely to succeed of all the serious electronic cash systems currently publically announced. I think I like some parts of their architecture, but to a great extent they seem to be completely at odds with the "free money" goals I have for electronic cash -- they're totally owned by the banking industry, willing to give up a great deal of privacy and anonymity in the name of preventing money laundering, and they appear committed to supporting only current national currencies, rather than allowing corporate scrip from either existing large companies (I trust at&t more than most governments) or organizations which buy a bunch of gold, charge minimal overhead, and issue currency totally backed by their assets. I'd be somewhat annoyed if the big electronic cash system only moved current statist cash into the electronic realm. Does anyone know how open the Mondex architecture is? Is it in any way possible to set up a competing system with your own card manufacture and issuing bodies for currencies which can be used in deployed Mondex POS terminals without too much hassle? Would this be analagous to the problem of replacing InterNIC with other NICs -- you need to make the user servers know to look at the rival systems and understand their keys? It would be kind of impressive in a way if Mondex were lame about allowing other currencies to proliferate free of state influences, yet managed to get the basic technology employed around the world, then some cypherpunkish group came up with their own cards, a little bit of software, etc. and then issued currency with more behind it than Mondex franchisees, had higher profits than Mondex, and then were to be the only currencies anyone would trust after the collapse of a few state-backed currencies. Also, I'd trust the cypherpunkish crowd to do a better job of hardware and software design for the cards and system, so they're likely to be more secure in that fashion as well. Am I being utterly out of touch with reality, or only tangential to it? --- Ryan Lackey rdl@mit.edu http://mit.edu/rdl/www/