A 'Funky A.T.M.' Lets You Pay for Purchases Made Online

[Sampo Syreeni]

On 2003-07-23, Sunder uttered:

>If you want to do electronic payments that are non-anonymous you can
>simply use a credit card or debit card (or something like paypal, egold),
>or for larger quanitities you can do wire transfers - so why would we
>need yet another a non-anonymous "cash" that isn't cash?

I only objected to the notion that all digicash needs to be anonymous in
order to be desirable. I didn't say this particular system amounts to
desirable weak digicash. To that end it would likely make far more sense
in the short term e.g. to marry Visa Electronic to PayPal. In the long
term multiple cooperating PayPal-like entities could then be used to build
mixnets, making the digicash strongly anonymous.

As for Morlock Elloi's objection, what you have on your bank account *is*
money, and debit cards simply a technological quirk which allows us to
access it. Furthermore, any medium of indirect exchange is by definition
money and at least Merriam-Webster defines cash as "ready money". So we
might define cash as the most liquid form a money available. After that we
can claim that in the presence of ubiquitous debit capability and a
steadily growing aversion towards those using paper money, the latter is
not in fact cash at all, but a less liquid cash (bits on a mainframe)
substitute used when we're willing to pay a premium (in convenience and
depreciation) for anonymity.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
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