

How to make a mint: The cryptography of anonymous electronic cash - daeken
http://jya.com/nsamint.htm

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jonasvp
I've been thinking very hard about this topic lately and actually went ahead
with writing some code. Then I found <http://www.opencoin.org> who already did
some of the work.

I think there's a lot than can be done in this field - not with micropayments,
which everybody seems to think about first when they see this. What I find a
lot more interesting is the possibility of many competing Internet currencies
not tied to any national one.

How about turning HN karma into a currency? Probably no mass-market appeal...
what's lacking is a killer application for digital money and when it comes,
it'll probably be in a form that doesn't seem like money to us now.

~~~
wmf
_What I find a lot more interesting is the possibility of many competing
Internet currencies not tied to any national one._

Would you also find it interesting to be indicted for money laundering?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold>
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/e-gold/>

~~~
jonasvp
Well, it would probably be an interesting experience... not that I would care
to find out. That's why I said the killer application would probably not look
like money to us.

Take Youtube, for instance: people go to considerable lengths to create videos
that others find interesting. Then they sit glued to the screen watching the
view counter go up. There's a currency: people paying with their time (which
everybody only has a fixed amount of) for someone's work creating videos.

Now have some ISP give extra bandwidth to people with Youtube videos over x
thousand views. It doesn't cost them much "real" money since bandwidth is more
or less a fixed cost but you have turned "virtual" money into a currency.

Granted, the example is a bit contrived but you can see where I'm going with
this.

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daeken
Despite being an old article, I've seen few references to it in the wild, and
thought it was very relevant after seeing
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=777283>

~~~
jacquesm
There was a dutch company called DigiCash that was quite far with developing
such a concept.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash>

~~~
daeken
There's also ECache: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECache>

Very, very interesting stuff.

~~~
jacquesm
The first party to create a universal micropayment system for the web that is
really usable is going to make it very big imo.

It would be a viable alternative to the ad supported model.

Most websites operate on very small fractions of a cent per pageview, you
would have to have an extremely low overhead to make it work.

Say you pay a monthly subscription to the payment service provider, they then
do all the bookkeeping based on a .js tag that is embedded on the page that
you visit.

If you don't have an account the .js redirects you to the signup page for the
payments service provider, you register, pay your initial fee and continue to
browse.

You might even end up saving online newspapers in the process.

~~~
apotheon
. . . which falls apart for people who don't allow JavaScript to execute in
the browser. This would definitely impact some Websites more than others.

~~~
sho
The number of pepople who don't allow JS in the browser is vanishingly small
and are probably (mostly) the paranoid type who wouldn't use an internet
payment service anyway. IMO.

~~~
apotheon
Ah, yes, the old "I like to turn away certain classes of customers because I
don't think well of them!" approach to market share. That works well.

~~~
jacquesm
I don't have one opinion or another about the customers, all I know is that
you can build a viable business without catering to everybody. 92+% of the
visitors to the sites that I look after have java support, 97%+ have
javascript.

I don't think the remaining 3% are going to be the ones to make or break such
an application.

Try using facebook, youtube or any other number of sites with flash, java and
javascript shut off.

~~~
apotheon
> Try using facebook, youtube or any other number of sites with flash, java .
> . . shut off.

Actually, I _do_ visit those sites without Flash automatically playing in my
browser. In fact, I use a script to download YouTube videos and play them
locally with a media player. I'm not sure what Java has to do with being able
to use Facebook or YouTube at all.

JavaScript is pretty ubiquitous, but stuff like Google Maps still degrades
usably for those who aren't using JavaScript (for instance), as do the sites
and Web applications I design.

I think that explicitly throwing away 3% of your potential users is pretty
short-sighted, especially when it's for something as lame as "Well, they don't
use JavaScript, and I could do this stuff with other technologies too." I
wonder why people don't think of, for instance, the blind using screen readers
when they utter platitudes about how the 3% don't matter.

------
anthonymc
Neal Stephenson has some things to say about this in Cryptonomicon. Great
book.

------
hughster
Your e-cash for the Internet must be transferrable in and out of your pocket
as well. The same money you use on eBay should be usable at the convenience
store. Mondex, etc. were the right idea (though tied to local currencies) but
ahead of their time for the technology. Maybe time to start thinking along
those lines again?

------
lionheart
The question is, is there anything else that is universally useful that we can
use as a basis for the currency?

How about something like Amazon Turk? Except you don't get paid in cash, you
get paid in points. All points had to have been generated by somebody doing a
small, useful service for somebody else.

------
Barry_Seal
I've been thinking about software to create economic instruments from
information (e.g., source code) that you could exchange for micropayments. Can
you recommend open source packages that might be useful for issuance and
trading?

