From: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 93 12:25:17 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Digital Cash Experiment
Message-ID: <199309021920.AA03777@panix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


To: cypherpunks@toad.com

Boy, you give people free money and they don't even use it.  Last 
Saturday, I posted the codes from a $5 Western Union phone card.  That is 
good for 8.3333 minutes of domestic long distance service.  Some people 
told me that they made calls on the card (and one generous soul even sent
me the codes from another $5 card in encrypted E-mail).  The 8 minutes in 
calls weren't, however, used up until today when I killed the last minute 
myself.  You can't even give money away.

Have all of you been to your local Western Union money transfer agent and 
bought your phone cards for convenient anonymous (when made from 
payphones) LD calls.

Today's NYT also featured a story about the similar Sprint phone cards 
(everyone and their uncle is issuing them these days).  Sprint cut a deal 
with Hallmark whereby you will be able to buy $6 greeting cards with a 10 
minute Sprint phone card inside so your recipient can call you back.  
This makes the calls 60 cents/minute which is the going rate for domestic 
LD calls on these cards.

And, yes this is a cypherpunks topic because it represents an anonymous 
telecommunications account (of sorts).

Duncan Frissell

The Economist has been tracking the price of a market basket of 
commodities since it was founded in the 1840s.  In the summer of 1991, the 
(inflation adjusted) price of those commodities fell to the lowest level 
ever observed.  I guess we aren't running out of things.  

--- WinQwk 2.0b#0