CDR: Re: Chaumian cash redux

Anonymous nobody at remailer.ch
Fri Sep 22 22:37:39 PDT 2000


Bob forwards:
> At the EFF end-of-RSA ball in SF last night David Chaum stood up and
> said a few enigmatic words:  "Great to be here, and what's really
> important now is that we all come together and have a common approach.
> I've looked at the old ecash and, (wry smile) there were a few
> problems.  But I've got some ideas about how to fix it and make it
> available in a way which avoids the kind of wars we've had in the past.
> I had wanted to make more of an announcement tonight, but the legal
> stuff is (as always) taking longer than I'd anticipated.  So,  thank
> you."  [applause]

Pretty interesting.  I wonder if he has an interesting new patent
unencumbered way to do ecash, and if he's going to make it patent
free.  Chaum, Brands and now Chaum II.  All speculation, of course,
but that'd be a real interesting shake-out of the ecash patent
minefield, and much kudos would be afford Dr Chaum who currently gets
perhaps more blame than fair for DigiCash burn out.  Perhaps a
protocol by him, with his patent background, might get more attention
than Wagner et al's pk MAC + ZKP of non-coin marking, if he could
organise some physical entity around it.

Did anyone who was there get a better idea of what Dr Chaum is up to?

Actually if (1) is really patent unencumbered, what it needs is some
organisation (a suggestion Bob) to provide demos, business
presentations and offer suit friendly support and legal
interpretations of the protocol's patent unemcumberedness, and it
could perhaps itself compete head on with Chaum I patents now held by
ECashTechnologies, and to some extent with Brands/Zero-Knowledge.
You've got to provide suits something to hold onto in the physical
world -- they really want to part with money, so you've got to
construct something to sell them a license to: a software library,
technical support from your collection of cryptographers or something,
anything that allows them to feel corporately assured.

ECashRumorMonger





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