Re: microcurrency: Netscape vs. Microsoft

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 01:05 PM 1/18/97 -0800, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:
>I predict that microcurrency will not catch on in a big way
>until it is integrated with browsers, and when it is, it
.....
>the idea would also be to invent some new html tags that
>indicate the charge on a link. the charge is incurred when
.....
>of time before some enterprising programmers plug it all
>together in an easy to use way. (as far as I know the
>Digicash software is not easily integrated with any browser,
>am I correct?)

The Digicash software wasn't terribly easy to integrate with _anything_,
but folks like Lucky Green have been banging on them to define and
release their interface specs, and there's a library called -lucre
that will do the Digicash functions.  A few months ago, Ian 
demonstrated a Digicash-compatible plugin at one of our Bay Area
cypherpunks meetings (with blinding removed for patent reasons.)

I don't know about BorgBrowser, but with Netscape, you can implement
non-built-in features as either a plug-in or as a helper application;
no need to mess with the HTML spec in yet another browser-specific manner.

You can also wedge things in using cookies (though their are non-cookie-aware
browsers and people who turn their browsers off) which could work well for
lower-security microcurrencies.  For instance, connecting to 
http://newspaper.com/cookie-store.html could take your credit card with SSL
and give you a cookie with 100 or 1000 credits using some S/Key-like
mechanism,
and each time you read a news page it would decrement by one.  To avoid
fraud (people resetting their cookie files) the newspaper would have to
track cookie use, but they may be tracking who's reading what anyway.

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
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