[Digital cash inventor David Chaum filed for his first patent in this area on June 25, 1982. The suite begins to expire in 2002, with an important patent expiring in 2005. Seems as though we'll have to wait 'til then to see truly anonymous digital cash. For now, we're stuck with PayPal and credit cards. Sigh. --Declan] --- http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,44507,00.html Digging Those Digicash Blues By Declan McCullagh (declanat_private) 2:00 a.m. June 14, 2001 PDT BALTIMORE -- For the last six years, Robert Hettinga has been agitating, begging and pleading for the world to listen to his ambitious plans for digital money. Like any savvy techno-evangelist, Hettinga coined a name for his idea -- digital bearer certificates -- and envisions a day when Internet users can withdraw electronic cash by simply typing in an ATM card number and their PIN. To bolster his campaign, Hettinga launched the Digital Commerce Society of Boston, co-founded the Financial Cryptography conference, and has become a fixture on mailing lists devoted to cryptography and security. DCSB has even birthed offspring: On Tuesday, Hettinga came to Baltimore to speak at the inaugural meeting of a new sister chapter. But six years, five Financial Cryptography conferences and thousands of e-mail missives later, Hettinga has been almost entirely unsuccessful in attracting serious interest in his ideas. His two-year-old Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation missed the ready capital of the online boom. It has attracted only $160,000 in funding, and has done about $100,000 of consulting work so far. "Quite frankly, the dot-com money has gone away," says Hettinga, 42. "We're also running over ground that CyberCash, DigiCash and a lot of other people have burned." Incinerated would be closer to the truth. The electronic cash landscape is littered with the looted corpses of companies that tried and failed to compete with credit cards for online purchases. True digital cash that's as anonymous, as privacy-protected and as cheap as the humble greenback seems to be one of those technologies that pundits laud and technologists adore, but markets stubbornly fail to adopt. [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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