From: solman@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 94 09:53:13 PDT
To: rah@shipwright.com (Robert Hettinga)
Subject: Re: Voice/Fax Checks
In-Reply-To: <199407211641.MAA25949@zork.tiac.net>
Message-ID: <9407211652.AA09087@ua.MIT.EDU>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> At 11:38 AM 7/21/94 -0400, solman@MIT.EDU wrote:
> >The selling point for digital cash is that it has a low transaction cost
> >and can easily be used for extremelly small transactions. If agent A and
> >agent B want to do business without bothering their owners, you had better
> >have some robust digicash.
> 
> I've made this claim myself here before.  It's possible you're in a
> position to verify it.  Can you?

Not yet. But I'm just a few weeks away from Alpha testing a very
large web-based project which has all sorts of agents interacting
with each other and dealing in very small amounts of money. It
includes a second rate (but effective) digital cash protocol.
When I'm done (which will be very soon), I'll post the code
here so everybody can tell me what's wrong. I am presently
attempting to upgrade the digital cash to a new method that
I've devised (using other people's demonstratedly secure
primatives of course). That's why I joined this list recently.

I am sure of two things:

A) To extract the greatest possible value from human time,
it is necessary so set up a complex infrastructure of agents
that can abstract tasks whenever possible.

and

B) A system like this can not exist without a method of
dealing with extremelly small monetary transactions.

If my confidence is not misplaced, digital cash is simply
required by the digital future.

JWS