Digicash Patents

[Bill Stewart]

At 10:19 PM 07/31/2003 -0500, Mac Norton wrote:
>I'm not sure that Paypal has met the needs of any enduser yet,
>so I'd question whether it "succeeded."

Huh?  Paypal was wildly successful at meeting the
perceived needs of end users.  Whether it met the needs of
stockholders before EBay bought it is a separate question.
It wasn't pretending to be a perfect cypherpunks solution.

Paypal gave people who wanted to occasionally sell things
on the net a way to receive payments online, quasi-immediately,
without going to the major hassle of becoming a registered
credit-card-accepting business, and let
people who wanted to buy things online send money immediately
without sending their credit cards directly to random individuals,
and let both sides avoid the delay and bounceability of checks-by-snail,
and reduced the likelihood of fraud in the payment process.