Re: Digital Cash

[smb@research.att.com]

	 Online systems are also guaranteed anonymous.

Well, maybe, though traffic analysis may be a problem.

I did hear of an interesting case of people paying for privacy in the real
world.  In Hong Kong, the Aberdeen tunnel has drive-through smart card
readers for tolls.  The problem is, these cards don't use a privacy-
protecting protocol.  And many folks there are worried about what will
happen come 1997.  So there's now a resale market -- stores buy toll
cards in quantity, and resell them over the counter, for cash.

This underscores what I've said in the past about anonymous digital
cash:  it's not going to go anywhere unless folks are willing to pay
a premium for privacy.  There are too many sound reasons for keeping
audit trails (debugging, fraud detection, marketing analysis, etc. --
and note that the first is an issue even for folks with the best intentions
in the word; note how many remailer operators have kept logs, at least
for a while); unless there's a profit motive in doing otherwise, most
folks won't.  In Hong Kong, the threat is not just real and imminent,
it's *perceived* as such.  Whether or not there is a real threat in, say,
the U.S. (let's please not debate that!), there's much less perception
of one.