Steve Schear wrote:

[I wonder what if any effect this might have on crypto patents, e.g., Chaumian blinding?]

My guess is, nix, nada. Patents are a red herring in the blinding skirmishes, they became a convenient excuse and a point to place the flag when rallying the troops. The battle was elsewhere, but it was good to have something to keep the press distracted. You can see this in, for example, the long available Wagner variation, and the availability of a bunch of other variations. Even when people started doing demo code of the various alternates (Magic Money, Ben Laurie's Lucre, etc) there was little to no amounts of interest. (There is one guy working to turn BLL into a system, and then there is our WebFunds project, originally started from on an old port of MM back in 1999 or so. That's it as far as I know, what is clear is that there is no inundation of monetary offers for the tech. I know a couple of people who put or promised some money, but it was all pocket change.) Any one with any business experience realises that the patents were a huge risk factor, so the obvious thing was to de-risk it. Hence, use Wagner first and shop for another method later (we figured this out in 2001 after the first coder's Chaum code was replaced by the second's Wagner efforts... Or was it Brands....). Hence, there are no business analysies being done, and therefore, no business. Here we remain within sight of the expiry of the first of Chaum's patents, and still lukewarm interest in blinding. I predict the date will pass and nothing will change. The real barriers to token money systems are these: 1. lack of a viable application 2. tokens require downloaded clients 3. bearer is a dirty word 4. full implementation requires too many skills (not authoritive) As against approximations (DGCs, Paypals, nymous) blinded token money systems don't attract enough real business zing to make them attractive enough to overcome the barriers. (I personally am somewhat agnostic on blinding, to the annoyance of many high priests of the order. I think the bank robbery problem is a bit of a devil, but OTOH, I just spent today working on getting token withdrawals going again. That's because I know of a group that wants it for a very interesting application to do vaguely with the 3rd world :-)

"The European Parliament's decision to limit patents... risks creating a "patent war" with a fallout that could make it illegal to access some European e-commerce sites from the United States..."

"Pure software should not be patentable, the parliament argued, and software makers should not be required to license patented technology for the purposes of interoperability--for example, creating a device that can play a patented media format, or allowing a computer program to read and write a competitor's patented file formats. "

"The amendments also sought to ban the patenting of business methods such as Amazon.com's patent on one-click purchasing. "

Full story at http://news.com.com/2100-1014_3-5086062.html?tag=nefd_top

Another factor is that Europe has effectively emasculated the entrepreneurial digital money field with the E-money directive. It's been a while since I read it, but it basically forces the small guy to be "just like a bank" or to be so small as to not have a future. Empirically, I know two people - entrepreneurs - who've tried to get into it, then read the directive, and said "it can't be done" (both from different countries that actually claim to promote the field). (The USA, under the quiet guidance of certain very smart people, went the other way and deliberately held off from doing or saying anything. They realised that they could do nothing but harm... so they "declined" to get involved. Also, in the US, there is very much more of a spirit of doing something if it is not explicitly banned. In Europe, there is much more of a spirit of getting permission if it is not explicitly permitted, on the assumption that the government knows what it is talking about.) The only ones who are interested in reducing transaction costs (in the blinding fashion) are new outsiders looking to set up new payment systems. Hence, the arisal of the digital gold currencies was centered around the US, and the smart card efforts of the Europeans were centered around the national banking structures. Smart card schemes cost O($100,000,000) whereas these days a DGC costs O($100,000). Go figure. iang --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com