Re: IP: "CyberCash can't oust credit cards"

[Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>]

At 8:47 AM -0400 on 7/7/98, Arnold G. Reinhold wrote:



> Three orders of magnitude cost reduction as compared to what?  I can
> believe that much improvement over running my credit card thru an imprinter
> and processing the paper slip.

Yes. SSL and HTML does that to paper, even telephone, credit card
transactions. As long as you're using the net anyway. :-).

> But I doubt you can get anything like1000X
> over SET, ugly as it is.

Actually, it's *SET's* burden to proove that it's 1000X cheaper (including
the cost of fraud) than SSL, the status quo ante of internet payment
systems.

I don't think SET is cheaper, much less three orders of magnitude cheaper,
than SSL.

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The Philodox Symposium on Digital Bearer Transaction Settlement
  July 23-24, 1998: <http://www.philodox.com/symposiuminfo.html>