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

[Adam Back]

I wrote:
> [2] Hal Finney used to have a description of Chaum's protocol on rain.org
> but he's at www.finney.org/~hal/ now and I can't find the link.

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.

www.digicash.com has some blurbs about "solutions", a few "demos" --
actually shockwave animations I can't view under linux -- and a few
press releases about deals -- but no indication of where would could
go to download a client or obtain a real account.

Another interesting and related use for ecash would be file
distribution systems which use economics to resist DoS, and give
people an incentive to run them, and profits to fuel the scaling of
the system to scale.  Examples are Mojonation's mojo and some of my
and Ryan Lackey's earlier musings about eternity / cypherspace /
distributed content sharing.

So in the mean time we have privacy less things like paypal apparently
getting reasonable adoption.

I was going to read about visa cash -- but more fscking shockwave --
the frontpage is shockwave no less so you get zip information out of
them.

http://www.visacash.com/

Adam