Banks and Institutions

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Susan Holland Chris Moran Peter Byrne
Ecash From Digicash
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Contents
Ecash
Introduction Advantages Disadvantages Anonymity
and Security Banks and Institutions
Involved Conclusion
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Introduction

• The number of internet users world wide is
  rapidly increasing
• Therefore the number of potential customers is
  growing
• It is expected that E-commerce will be a great
  source of income for many companies
• But there is a void, a reliable, secure and
  efficient new currency is needed.
• Ecash from DigiCash could be the answer

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Advantages of E-cash

• Speed and Efficiency
• User friendly
• Wide Acceptability
• Superiority to the Credit Card
• Flexibility
• Anonymity and Security

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• Disadvantages

• There's a rush to establish the protocols that
  will define what e-cash is.
• At the moment you can't trust the solvency of the
  issuer.
• Without ground rules, uncertainty will undermine
  e-cash's usefulness.
• Worst case scenario no standard for e-cash
  exists,
• Crossing over from standards would resemble
  foreign-exchange, an expensive process.
• Cyberspace is not a nation digital, money could
  unify currencies in cyberspace, creating a means
  to avoid paying conversion fees.
• The market for micropurchases has shrunk recently
  as consumers become more comfortable with using
  credit cards for Internet transactions.
• To avoid double spending, the minting bank must
  record every coin that is deposited back into
  the bank.
• A huge database of all spent serial numbers
  develops.
• May result in unacceptable delays and
  overloading.

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Anonymity and SecurityEvery time one uses a
credits card information about that person can be
recorded somewhere.Various records from other
transactions can be linked with these forming a
dossier on ones life necessary for some
institutions results in a lack of privacy
for the individualEcash provides a form of
anonymous payment using cryptography. Both the
bank and the user have a public and private key,a
digital signature and a process called blinding.

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This system is fully anonymous as there is no way
to trace coins back to the user.
The Ecash payment system is the
best known cryptographic application.Other
areas are electronic commerce, electronic voting
and medical privacy.The security of the system
is so great that the popularity of ecash is
likely to increase in the future.
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Banks and Institutions

• Banks involved
• Deutsche Bank
• Credit Suisse
• Mark Twain Bank of St Louis
• Institutions involved
• DigiCash

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• Conclusion
• Ecash can be minted and transferred indefinitely.
• It could conceivably float against other
  currencies, untaxed,uncontrolled.
• Ecash provides secure, fully anonymous cash for
  open networks.
• Computationally intensive cryptography, multiple
  messages, and
• database lookups prevent it from being used for
  efficient repeated micropayments.
• The scalability is perhaps limited by the cost of
  maintaining
• and searching a large database of all spent
  serial numbers during
• a purchase.

The End