At 15:52 9/22/2000 -0400, R. A. Hettinga forwarded:
>At the EFF end-of-RSA ball in SF last night David Chaum stood up and
>said a few enigmatic words [...]
Well, I wasn't there -- we still were recovering from our own east coast
bash the day before... But here's some stuff (below) that might be interesting.
First, an article that appeared in the September 20, 2000 issue of American
Banker. You'll recall that circa May 1999, Drew Hyatt and other folks
bought the 16 patents from Digicash/Chaum and formed eCash Technologies.
Excerpt from article:
> Back when Digicash Inc. was trying to sell its eCash electronic payment
>products to U.S. banks, there were few takers.
>
> But now the products are being offered by eCash Technologies Inc.,
> which has
>struck at least one noteworthy deal: Metavante Corp., the technology
>subsidiary
>of Marshall & Ilsley Corp., has agreed to integrate the products into its
>transaction processing system.
>
> Metavante said it could not discuss the deal because it is in a "quiet
>period" related to an initial public offering. The company, which provides
>data
>processing services for 700 banks, will begin by offering its members eCash's
>Monneta Debit software, which allows consumers to shop or send money online
>without exposing their actual debit card numbers.
[...]
> eCash Technologies is marketing the electronic payment products under the
>name Monneta. The company is touting the Monneta suite -- which includes
>debit,
>prepaid, business-to-business, and person-to-person payment products -- as an
>anonymous way to make online payments. It uses a blind signature system, which
>means that customers can send money to one another through e-mail, or buy from
>any online merchant site, without revealing their identities.
Joseph Nocera, editor-at-large at Fortune, is a smart fellow and a good
interviewer. I know him from when I was also at Time Inc. He wrote in the
August 2000 issue of Money magazine:
> But of course someone did think of it before. He was just too far ahead of
>his time. When I spoke to Chaum recently, he professed to have "burned out"
>trying to make Digicash work. He had sold its patents to another company
>and was
>no longer paying close attention to the business.
>
> He did tell me about a few of his more recent breakthroughs, however.
> One was
>called Digilock. "You take an ordinary key," he explained, "and put it in an
>ordinary lock, and it looks it up in a database and says whether the key
>is okay
>or not. It makes it possible for a person to have one key for everything."
>Yeah,
>I know: It sounds a little far out. But then, I used to think e-cash sounded
>pretty far out too.
-Declan
