From: "Lucky Green" <shamrock@netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1998 12:34:58 +0800
To: <cryptography@c2.net>
Subject: DigiCash Update, part II
Message-ID: <004d01be28a9$64561620$0401010a@luckylaptop.c2.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



As some of you may be aware of, I am involved with an effort to
acquire DigiCash. Allow me therefore to suggest that now is not a good
time to attempt to purchase a patent license directly from DigiCash.
You would most likely be paying too much.

DigiCash has for months now attempted to find a buyer for the
company's assets. Due to the expectations on the value of the assets, and
differences between this and the offers they've received, the board has
turned down these offers, including the first offer by my group. Ultimately,
the
differences between some of the high expectations the board has, and
the actual offers they are receiving will be worked out between higher
offers and lower expectations. Until then, DigiCash operates on a
post-bankruptcy filing bridge loan. This loan won't last forever.

Ultimately, DigiCash will be sold. But nobody wants to wait forever.
Not you, not me, not the DigiCash board. The faster DigiCash gets sold
to our group, the faster the technology will become available to all
interested parties under low cost (and in many cases free) licensing
terms. Even if DigiCash should now be willing to sell licenses to
generate cash flow or reorganize in some new plan and forestall the
inevitable sales of assets a little bit longer, the current DigiCash
is unlikely to make the licenses available for as low of a cost as our
group will make them available after an acquisition of DigiCash.

We are in a position to offer potentially significant cost
minimization to any prospective licensee of DigiCash IP. With every
additional party committing to our effort, we can reduce the cost per
license. Scott of course would be amiss of his fiduciary duty would he
not attempt to maximize the financial return to DigiCash. We have no
such constraint.   I have a lot of respect for Scott and he is trying
to do what is best for the DigiCash shareholders and debtholders (As
he should).   We on the other hand are more focused on what is best for
the technology, to ensure it is deployed widely and in all it's
various potential uses.

The more serious parties join our effort, the faster will we be able
to make another bid and the faster the DigiCash board will review and
hopefully approve our next offer. Ultimately, everybody will be happy.
The creditors will be happy since they get their money, the current
executive group at DigiCash will be happy to move on having
successfully found a palatable deal, and the licensees will be happy,
since they will be able to obtain the IP and options for support and
technology development instead of being held in limbo with the present
DigiCash situation. And of course the developer community will be
happy, since the patents will be available to all, not just to the few
to which DigiCash might license the patents to improve their
unfortunate cash flow situation. This broad availability will allow
the market to validate the technology. No single player, or even small
group of players, can make eCash a success. Only an aggressive push by
many large, small and medium sized players who are all deploying eCash
and blinded private payment systems can.

This is one of the many reasons our group has the support of several
of the larger banks in the world, banking software/EDI vendors, credit
card clearing houses, personal financial/cryptography software
vendors, global media corporations, and other players that are
required to make eCash and other DigiCash IP derived technologies
ubiquitous.

Feel free to contact DigiCash directly if you must.   We certainly
encourage people who are interested in exclusive ownership of the
DigiCash IP, and are not interested in opening up the patents or
technology to deal directly with them since this is contrary to our
goal.   But if you are interested in any one part, one use or
application or even in all of the parts in a non-exclusive way please
make sure to email me first as I believe it will benefit everyone for
a lot less money.

--Lucky Green <shamrock@netcom.com>
  I will soon revoke my PGP key 0x375AD924 for
  administrative reasons.