mondex

[Ryan Lackey <rdl@mit.edu>]

So, it appears (at least to me and many others) that Mondex is the most 
likely to succeed of all the serious electronic cash systems currently
publically announced.  I think I like some parts of their architecture,
but to a great extent they seem to be completely at odds with the
"free money" goals I have for electronic cash -- they're totally owned
by the banking industry, willing to give up a great deal of privacy and
anonymity in the name of preventing money laundering, and they appear
committed to supporting only current national currencies, rather than
allowing corporate scrip from either existing large companies (I trust
at&t more than most governments) or organizations which buy a bunch of
gold, charge minimal overhead, and issue currency totally backed by
their assets.  I'd be somewhat annoyed if the big electronic cash system
only moved current statist cash into the electronic realm.

Does anyone know how open the Mondex architecture is?  Is it in any way
possible to set up a competing system with your own card manufacture
and issuing bodies for currencies which can be used in deployed Mondex
POS terminals without too much hassle?  Would this be analagous to the
problem of replacing InterNIC with other NICs -- you need to make the
user servers know to look at the rival systems and understand their 
keys?

It would be kind of impressive in a way if Mondex were lame about 
allowing other currencies to proliferate free of state influences, yet
managed to get the basic technology employed around the world, then some
cypherpunkish group came up with their own cards, a little bit of
software, etc. and then issued currency with more behind it than Mondex
franchisees, had higher profits than Mondex, and then were to be the
only currencies anyone would trust after the collapse of a few state-backed
currencies.  Also, I'd trust the cypherpunkish crowd to do a better job
of hardware and software design for the cards and system, so they're
likely to be more secure in that fashion as well.

Am I being utterly out of touch with reality, or only tangential to it?

---
Ryan Lackey
rdl@mit.edu
http://mit.edu/rdl/www/