-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I have to admit I don't know the ecash concepts well enough to respond very intelligently to everything you talked about, though I'd like to address one of your comments on inter-bank clearing. I wanted to bring up one misconception: you mention that the main worth of ecash is measured by whether merchants will accept it as payment, and that whether a bank will accept it as a deposit is just a secondary issue. From this you conclude that so long as a merchant can validate ecash (via online clearing, to detect double-spending), it doesn't really matter whether that merchant's bank will accept the ecash -- just that other merchants will accept the ecash. This is brought up in the context of "what if Bank B didn't accept [deposits of] ecash from Bank A?". I claim that this is at best misleading, because with Digicash's ecash, when a merchant receives ecash as payment, the ecash is "made out" to that particular merchant, and is non-transferable-- i.e. can't be used as payment to another merchant. When you've been payed Digicash ecash, about the only interesting thing you can do is deposit it with your bank. [ For simplicity, I'm ignoring wildcards in the "pay to" field; but wildcards are insecure on their own. Digicash hasn't really attempted to support wildcards or transferable ecash in general, as far as I can tell. Correct me if I'm wrong. ] - --- [This message has been signed by an auto-signing service. A valid signature means only that it has been received at the address corresponding to the signature and forwarded.] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Gratis auto-signing service iQBFAwUBMOYZwCoZzwIn1bdtAQFvaQGA1f4oy6Z2TF9810fIUEqkktpQN01FPUCb ER/q3WI/kuyjQCBJh/laA0QsU2q8jnP4 =8Mib -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----