From: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)

At 5:19 AM 2/4/95, Anonymous wrote:

...

I wonder if 'Net-cash' is any good?

Probably the best discussion of the available transaction processing/settlement mechanisms is by Jason Solinsky. It's called "An Introduction to Electronic Commerce", and though he probably hasn't updated it since he wrote it a few months ago, he discusses NetCash there...

People interested in NetCash should be aware of a potentially confusing name re-use. NetCash is also the name of a payment system designed by people associated with the Information Sciences Institute (affiliated, I think, with USC). A reference is: <URL: ftp://PROSPERO.ISI.EDU/pub/netcheque/information/netcash-cccs93.ps.Z > Despite the names, neither one is cash in the cryptographic sense: neither uses blinding. If you didn't want the bank to be able to create a database of every transaction you make, everything you spend and with whom, you would need to have some anonymous connection with the bank and exchange your netcash through that connection. This would be cumbersome IMO. Some payment system is probably better than none, but I hate to see the name "cash" expropriated by these non-cash systems. Hal