Re: e$ : NetBank

[analyst@Onramp.NET (Benjamin McLemore)]

>There's an outfit called NetBank, which is selling e-cash-like *certificate
>numbers*,


8 digit numbers only. No internal checksums or verification. Merchants must
send an email message to verify that the money is previously unspent and
receive fresh bills.


>It's extremely ungainly, and it looks userous too, to the extent that they
>charge 20% (each way?) to cash you in and out.  I hoovered out all the
>stuff in their infobot (netbank-info@agents.com).

>Bob Hettinga
>


Agree about ungainliness. They aren't yet set-up with PGP or PEM, although
they say they are looking into it, so they currently suggest that if you
want to send encrypted mail, that you generate a key to be XOR'd with all
messages to and from. They do provide the C code for the encryption, though
;)

From reading all of the info from the above infobot, it looks like they
only charge the 20% once, to the merchant when he tries to redeem
e-certificates for $USD, which they will pay out at the end of each month.
They claim in their docs that the 20% is the cost of their 900 number
service, so I suppose their business plan is to make money on the float,
since they are not charging transaction fees for making change, verifying
e-cash, etc.

If they accepted credit cards they might be in much better shape.

I would much rather see real Chaum-style electronic money, but have not yet
received a response after signing up for their beta test.

I wonder if NetBank's style of serialized e-certificates provide the 75% of
the functionality that most people need to ignore better alternatives,
especially if, as with Pr0duct Cypher's money, their is a big learning
curve to go up before they can use it.

Any pointers to other near-term e-cash systems? I am very interested in
setting this up for relatively small transactions (<$50) in the
not-to-distant future.

Thanks for info.







--
Benjamin McLemore  <analyst@onramp.net>