From: paul@poboy.b17c.ingr.com (Paul Robichaux)
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 94 13:01:20 PST
To: hfinney@shell.portal.com (Hal)
Subject: Re: Brands excluded from digicash beta
In-Reply-To: <199412011627.IAA14481@jobe.shell.portal.com>
Message-ID: <199412012056.AA05724@poboy.b17c.ingr.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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I'm going to tie together two threads on ecash: one here (Hal and
Rishab have both mentioned the ecash system test recently) and one
from www-buyinfo about scalability. If you dislike ecash, hit 'n' now

I'm running one of the prototype shops
(http://www.iquest.com/~fairgate), so let me chime in with my e$0.02
of comments. (no, that doesn't mean I'll pay you e$0.02 to read them!)

Hal said:
> I just figured that I didn't have enough clout for them to bother to
> respond to me, but today on the www-buyinfo list, Stefan Brands, who
> many think has the best ecash technology available today, posted that he
> had had the same experience!  Brands himself has still not been given
> an opportunity to join the beta test.  He did not sound very happy about
> this.

I was in the same boat-- I sent in several requests, all of which were
ignored. After Digicash issued a call for prototype shops, I signed
up. WHAM. I immediately started getting mail asking when I'd have my
shop ready-- sometimes two or three messages a day.

Once I got everything up and running, I didn't hear further from them.
Since then, an accident on my WWW server has rendered the e-shop
inoperable. I've asked Digicash, in the form of Paul Diniessen, for
help reconstructing the bank records. No go.

> Of course, it may well be a matter of incompetence rather than insult,
> but the net result is the same.  The more I see of digicash's lack of
> consideration towards their potential customers and important figures like
> Brands the more I question whether they have the potential to succeed.

The more I deal with Digicash, the better First Virtual looks. My
technical preference is for using Brands or Chaum cash; at present,
though, there aren't any shipping Brands servers, and the Digicash
folks don't seem to be able to get all their socks in one bag.

Digicash's system doesn't scale entirely cleanly, but it's Good Enough
if there's one central bank which all other banks can use, just as the
credit card companies have a central clearinghouse which allows my
credit union Visa to be used with merchants whose accounts are at
Citibank. 

The problems with Digicash thus far have been political and
business problems, not technical ones. 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.

- -Paul

- -- 
Paul Robichaux, KD4JZG       | Good software engineering doesn't reduce the 
perobich@ingr.com            | amount of work you put into a product; it just 
Not speaking for Intergraph. | redistributes it differently.
		  ### http://www.intergraph.com ###

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