Things we should be working on...

[Sean Roach]

At 08:58 AM 9/2/97 -0700, Tim May wrote:
...
>2. A usable form of Chaum's cash, a la Goldberg's or Schear's or Back's or
>whomever's implementation. An evolution of Magic Money, Hashcash, etc.,
>using full strength algorithms. Backing can be decentralized. Less emphasis
>on deals with banks, more emphasis on guerilla deployment, a la PGP.
>
>(Initial uses may be for illegal things, which may be a good thing for
>deployment. Sex, for example, historically drives technologies like this.
>Thus, one might imagine combining blinded (no puns, please) cash with
>message pools to allow users to anonymously purchase JPEG images and have
>the resultant images placed in a pool for their later browsing. If done on
>a per image basis, for small amounts of digital cash, this could help users
>get their feet wet and gain familiarity. Integration into browsers would
>help.)
...
How about this.
The barter economy has predated the artificial construct that we know as money.
It even predates the use of precious metals, which are pretty worthless for
most uses.
Get some non bank supporters to accept "coupons" for thier merchandise.  At
first, this could easily be information based.  Make the "coupons" work on
all of this initial merchandise, which can be sold again and again, so
there's no great loss to the supporters.  Granted, this brings us back to a
form of money, but one based on commodies as opposed to worthless yellow
metal that is only sought after because it doesn't corrode and is soft
enough to work, (ignoring electronics, dental, and stained glass as more
recent developments for the shiny stuff.)
If PGP could be registered with a certain amount of these units, the same
with other crypto applications, all the better.  If people want this money,
they can call up their friendly neighborhood software salesman and buy it
knowing full well that if they ever want to, they can always trade it back
for a good "DOOM97 Hell Freezes Over" game.
They can take these signed DoomDollars to a moneychanger web site to change
it for PGPdollars, BorlandBucks, BlowfishClams and Kongbucks, all at the
current rate of change.
Just a stream of thought.  Maybe useful, maybe not.