Cash, cheaters, and anonymity

Robert Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Sat Aug 27 13:08:21 PDT 1994


At  1:26 PM 8/26/94 -0700, Hal wrote:

>With Observers you can have off-line cash that is as secure as on-line
>but without the costs of on-line validation.  As a vendor, which would
>you rather accept: off-line cash where you rely on legal sanctions to
>track down cheaters; on-line cash where you call the bank and verify it
>for every transaction; or off-line cash where you can validate it right
>there locally without checking with any bank?  Depending on the costs
>which the Observer adds to the digital wallet, that latter choice might
>be the most attractive.

It might be said that you haven't a digital wallet without an Observer, if
it's not horribly computation-intensive...

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
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Shipwright Development Corporation     who eats too little and sees Heaven and
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