newsweek oct 30 Levy digital cash article

[Jiri Baum]

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Hello Steven Levy <steven at echonyc.com>
  and cypherpunks at toad.com
  and "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri at netcom.com>

V.Z.N (order of paragraphs rearranged by J.B.):
...
> I would suggest to all companies developing e-cash that they print up
> a carefully designed FAQ in which their cash properties 
> are compared directly with parallel
> properties of credit cards such as like the item above, because the
...

Well, why not one of us?

Please have a look at http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~jirib/ecash-cc.html
and tell me what you think. Any good?

...
> how would the bank handle a situation in which the consumer says, "oops,
> my hard drive was compromised. all of the following cash was NOT spent
> by me."
...

Easy: whoever is at the bank first gets the cash. So you simply spend
all the coins (ie deposit it back to your account), and that's that.

...
> or, the bank might say, "oh, well, that cash was not spent yet. we can issue
> a replacement and bar the cash from being spent".
...

Yup. No special protocol is needed, either.

...
> S.L.:
> >Question: will people's worries about losing their e-money lead them to 
> >accept a higher degree of tracibility as a tradeoff?  
...

I read in the newspaper that the "Eros Foundation" (or whatever the name
is) has the second-largest mailing list in Australia. (The article was
about how they could affect elections should one or the other party promise
to ban X (non-violent erotica), and generally concluded that they could,
if they haven't already.) I wonder if that'd be a good market for
untraceable transactions?


Please tell me what you think of the page...
http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~jirib/ecash-cc.html

Jiri
- --
If you want an answer, please mail to <jirib at cs.monash.edu.au>.
On sweeney, I may delete without reading!
PGP 463A14D5 (but it's at home so it'll take a day or two)
PGP EF0607F9 (but it's at uni so don't rely on it too much)

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