From: mccoy@io.com (Jim McCoy)
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 94 13:52:09 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Brands excluded from digicash beta
In-Reply-To: <199412012056.AA05724@poboy.b17c.ingr.com>
Message-ID: <199412012151.PAA07927@pentagon.io.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


paul@poboy.b17c.ingr.com (Paul Robichaux) writes:
[digicash stuff...]
At some point I am going to have to take a look at my NDA with Digicash
again and see how much I can say about the reality of some of these
things... 
>
> As others have pointed out,
> network bandwidth and processing CPU are cheap enough to allow
> multiple banks to communicate cleanly. Real banks already understand
> how to do this.

Wanna bet?  You should get into a clearing discussion with Eric sometime (I
think that the clearing issue must be one of his favorite things in the
world as he has so much to say about it :)  Clearing is not only
non-trivial, it can be downright ugly.  A small system is not incredibly
difficult to set up, but a nationwide or global system would be something
that would give scores of engineers and designers nightmares for years to
come.  Things are easy when you talk about your $50 Visa purchase or check,
but when you start to deal with clearing big aggregate sums through banks
things get real nasty very quickly.

In the US we have the Fedwire system and other gifts of the Federal Reserve
to prop up a few of the weakest parts of the problem, but it is still a
house of cards waiting for the right puff of wind...

jim