In Search of Genuine DigiCash

[hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)]

   The reduced overhead increases economic efficiency. There are other reasons
   for not doing on-line transactions. Including credit checks, interest
   calculations on outstanding balances, vendor reserve requirements,
   transaction threading, on-line wait states and bandwidth, etc.

Whatever are you talking about?  Credit checks for an online system?
If anything, credit status for offline systems would be the salient
issue.  Interest calculations, if that's the product model, are
consistent with both online and offline systems.  Ditto for reserve
requirements.  Transaction serialization (threading) will be required
for both systems and look to be more complicated for offline systems
than for online.

There are some additional costs with implementing the high-uptime
systems required for online systems.  On the other hand, with the
right product structure, there's no need for identity at all in an
online system as there is in offline systems with the ability to
identify multiple spenders.

Eric