ecash, cut & choose and private credentials (Re: Jim Bell)

[Adam Back]

James wrote:
> Adam Back wrote:
>  > Hal says:
>  > >
>  > > http://www.finney.org/~hal/chcash1.html and
>  > > http://www.finney.org/~hal/chcash2.html
>  >
>  > Wow look at the dates on those files -- Oct 93, and we still no
>  > deployed ecash.  You'd think there would be a market there for porn
>  > sites alone with merchant repudiation rates, and lack of privacy in
>  > other payment systems.
> 
> The obvious starting market for good ecash is perverse 
> pornography.  Another good starting market is interactive sexual 
> performance over the internet.

Whatever the class of pornography it is that is popular on the
internet would indeed be a good starting market.  I'd consider this
class the "mainstream" pornography on the internet.  So I'm not sure
if you're referring to this or some more risky harder to find stuff
which people may arguably be willing to pay a higher premium for.  I'd
aim for the mainstream stuff due to volume.

> There have been many attempts at ecash, but I am not aware of any
> products involving useful, spendable, convenient, anonymous ecash
> targeted at that or similar markets.  The only really usable
> anonymous ecash was that of the Mark Twain bank, which crippled its
> cash to prevent it from being used by that market.

I presume the crippling you're talking about is the payee traceability
with collusion of payer and bank.

However I'm not sure I agree that the payee anonymity identification
feature killed it for this application.  For this particular
application there appear to be plenty of sites willing to serve the
content sans anonymity -- they're VISA, etc merchants no less.

I think the thing that killed MT / digicash for this application was
MT at the time was reported to be closing accounts related to
pornography -- they apparently didn't want the reputation for
providing payment mechanisms for the porn industry or something.

Plus of course:

- the need to download a client
- the small userbase making it an unattractive proposition for
  users
- the need to setup an account (in US funds) -- no accountless operation
- accounts were difficult to setup too
- the greedy fee structure
- differentiating between merchants and users

I'd have thought the thing to do was put an ecash client in Mozilla
and work on getting it into netscape.  Plus download plugins for
Internet Explorer.

So whoever develops enough clue, capability and interest in making
money to do this someday needs to think about making it work with
existing credit card sites.

Give back a one time credit card number for legacy sites which is
cryptographically unlinkable with the ecash spender.

In general try to make it interoperate with other payment systems.

Try to make it as painless and instant as possible to buy ecash.

All of this you'd think would be obvious.

Adam