Re: In Search of Genuine DigiCash

[rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)]

At  4:24 PM 8/19/94 -0700, Eric Hughes wrote:

>The withdrawal transaction posts a debit to a customers demand deposit
>account (decreasing it) and a credit to the suspension account
>(increasing it).

NewJargonNotice("suspension account")

Is this new nomenclature? It sounds less risque than "float", I must say...

>Where digital cash is immediately useful is online as a retail level
>wire transfer system.
          [snip]
>the cost of networking is
>dropping and the cost of computation is dropping.  I personally don't
>expect that off-line digital cash techniques will ever actually be
>economically most efficient.  Existing alternates (e.g. credit cards)
>work well enough today, and by the time PDA's work well enough and are
>cheap enough to be universal, the cost of an online verification will
>be down in the fractions of a cent.

Immediate and final clearing must save money, somehow, but right now, it's
hard to prove whether cash is still king in cyberspace. I have a (somewhat
religious, in the sense that it may not be empirically proved in my
lifetime) belief that that's the case.  That's why I like to agitate for a
test. Yes, Tim, I know, you guys aren't bankers...


Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

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