FC: Why we don't use digital cash

Declan McCullagh declan at well.com
Thu Jun 14 08:27:13 PDT 2001


[Digital cash inventor David Chaum filed for his first patent in this
area on June 25, 1982. The suite begins to expire in 2002, with an
important patent expiring in 2005. Seems as though we'll have to wait
'til then to see truly anonymous digital cash. For now, we're stuck
with PayPal and credit cards. Sigh. --Declan]

---

http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,44507,00.html

   Digging Those Digicash Blues
   By Declan McCullagh (declan at wired.com)
   2:00 a.m. June 14, 2001 PDT
   
   BALTIMORE -- For the last six years, Robert Hettinga has been
   agitating, begging and pleading for the world to listen to his
   ambitious plans for digital money.
   
   Like any savvy techno-evangelist, Hettinga coined a name for his idea
   -- digital bearer certificates -- and envisions a day when Internet
   users can withdraw electronic cash by simply typing in an ATM card
   number and their PIN.
   
   To bolster his campaign, Hettinga launched the Digital Commerce
   Society of Boston, co-founded the Financial Cryptography conference,
   and has become a fixture on mailing lists devoted to cryptography and
   security. DCSB has even birthed offspring: On Tuesday, Hettinga came
   to Baltimore to speak at the inaugural meeting of a new sister
   chapter.

   But six years, five Financial Cryptography conferences and thousands
   of e-mail missives later, Hettinga has been almost entirely
   unsuccessful in attracting serious interest in his ideas.
   
   His two-year-old Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation missed the
   ready capital of the online boom. It has attracted only $160,000 in
   funding, and has done about $100,000 of consulting work so far.
   
   "Quite frankly, the dot-com money has gone away," says Hettinga, 42.
   "We're also running over ground that CyberCash, DigiCash and a lot of
   other people have burned."
   
   Incinerated would be closer to the truth. The electronic cash
   landscape is littered with the looted corpses of companies that tried
   and failed to compete with credit cards for online purchases.
   
   True digital cash that's as anonymous, as privacy-protected and as
   cheap as the humble greenback seems to be one of those technologies
   that pundits laud and technologists adore, but markets stubbornly fail
   to adopt.

   [...]




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