Digital cash is a digital mean of payment having most of the characteristics of realworld cash money, i.e. anonymity, untraceability…
The ideal system from an anarchist point of view is a double-blind system (both paries in an exchange are anonymous) but there are systems out, most of them designed by the foremost financial cryptographer David Chaum where only the buyer is anonymous but the merchant is not.Systems also differ by wether they have an offline capability, the issue being to forbid people spending the same digital coins at different merchants. This is relatively easy to avoid in an online, transactional system and very hard to avoid in a system with offline capability.
Digital cash is one of the things that could make micropayments over the Internet a widespread reality.
External links
- A seminal paper by Tim May about what will happens once it’s a widespread reality
- Wikipedia‘s entry on electronic money
- Pepper Coins, Ron Rivest‘s micropayment company
- EFF‘s page on digital money
TakeDown.NET -> “Digital-cash”