Re: [ecash] Re: Multi-issuer questions

[daw@boston.CS.Berkeley.EDU (David A Wagner)]

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I have to admit I don't know the ecash concepts well enough to respond
very intelligently to everything you talked about, though I'd like to
address one of your comments on inter-bank clearing.

I wanted to bring up one misconception: you mention that the main worth
of ecash is measured by whether merchants will accept it as payment,
and that whether a bank will accept it as a deposit is just a secondary
issue.  From this you conclude that so long as a merchant can validate
ecash (via online clearing, to detect double-spending), it doesn't really
matter whether that merchant's bank will accept the ecash -- just that
other merchants will accept the ecash.  This is brought up in the context
of "what if Bank B didn't accept [deposits of] ecash from Bank A?".

I claim that this is at best misleading, because with Digicash's ecash,
when a merchant receives ecash as payment, the ecash is "made out" to
that particular merchant, and is non-transferable-- i.e. can't be
used as payment to another merchant.  When you've been payed Digicash
ecash, about the only interesting thing you can do is deposit it with
your bank.

[ For simplicity, I'm ignoring wildcards in the "pay to" field; but
wildcards are insecure on their own.  Digicash hasn't really attempted
to support wildcards or transferable ecash in general, as far as I
can tell.  Correct me if I'm wrong. ]
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