Caching Cash (ecash speed)

[Bill Frantz]

At 10:41 11/9/95 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>The concerns Hal raises about ecash speed are important. CPU speeds are not
>the problem, network speeds are---many home and small business users have
>very fast CPUs, able to funtion as Web servers all by themselves, but have
>relatively slow network connections.

Tim is of course right that network speeds are the problem.  However, the
network limit is the speed of light and not current network technology.  If
your bank is half-way around the world, the 1/7 second round trip will kill
any chance you have of offering 1/10 second response time.

For some thinking on the subject of caching cash, see the "Digital Silk
Road" paper accessable through the Agorics home page:
http://www.webcom.com/~agorics/

BTW - I don't think we should be talking about a penny/page cost because it
is way too high for the current market.  For example, my copy of Applied
Cryptography V2 cost about $.067/page AND came with the media to keep it
"forever".  My (used) copy of Snow Crash cost closer to a penny/page and
also came with the media.  I would think that somewhere between 1/100 to
1/10 of a penny/page is closer to the current market value of the page
content.

Bill


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Bill Frantz                   Periwinkle  --  Computer Consulting
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