From: hal@finney.org
Date: Fri Mar 03 2000 - 00:12:49 MST
Eugene Leitl, <eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>, writes:
> It is really unfortunate that all the usable algorithms for digicash
> have a lock on them, in legalspace. Someone oughta rescue all these
> poor bits, and bring them into circulation.
There are a few things going on which are at least somewhat encouraging.
DigiCash, which had all the original ecash patents based on work by David
Chaum, went out of business last year. But the patents have been bought
by ecashtechnologies.com, and they are apparently trying to get a bank
interested (still following the DigiCash model it seems).
One of Chaum's old students, Stefan Brands, developed some really fancy
technology which could do ecash and some other neat stuff too and arguably
evaded Chaum's patents. Unfortunately he turned around and patented it
all himself (having learned from the master, I guess). However last
week it was announced that cypherpunk company Zero Knowledge Systems
had hired Brands and licensed his patents. These seem to be good guys
so I am hopeful they will do something beneficial with the technology.
A few years ago David Wagner, a really sharp guy, invented a way to do
ecash that also arguably avoids Chaum's and Brands' patents. And, being
also a nice guy he did not patent it. Ben Laurie has been working on an
implementation of this called Lucre. At this point he is looking for
lawyers to give him a judgement on whether the technology does succeed
in navigating around the patent barriers. It looks very promising.
Somewhat surprisingly the market for person-to-person payments has
suddenly sprung into being in the past year, centered around eBay,
the online garage sale. eBay has rolled out its own payment system as
of yesterday, but the two main competing payment companies, x.com and
paypal, said today that they would merge. Presumably they hope that
with a united front they can carve out a niche on eBay.
Whomever wins, once there is a widespread person to person payment
infrastructure it should be possible to layer ecash on top of it.
This might lead to a more decentralized solution which would be less of
a target for regulators.
You'll notice that a lot of this has happened only in the last few weeks
and even days. It's very exciting to watch.
Hal
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