One of the fashionable things about ecash is (or at least was back in the mid 90’s when ecash was fashionable, and pre-September 11) that it can provide anonymity: neither the bank, or the merchant, or the government can track how you spend your money. Lucre provides anonymity to the degree that you can’t do […]
Raph Levien points to a comment by Tim Bray that says, among other things: Those fables were taken to the UN Security Council and ended doing severe damage to America relationships with pretty well everybody, because pretty well everybody refused to sign up for war on the basis that they were scared of Saddams WMDs, […]
There’s an interesting paper on millicents (digital cash worth about a thousandth of a cent) from a guy who seems to be involved in Microsoft’s Penny Black project. A decade hence, assuming that computers (and their components) continue on the price and performance curves of the last two decades, the minimum transaction grain will be […]
Oh, the double entendres. Anyway, this Infoworld article quotes Ryan Hamlin, the general manager of Microsoft’s antispam technology and strategy: “It won’t surprise me at all if we spend close to $18 billion a year next year to deal with spam,” he said. This cost includes the price of filtering software and storage hardware and […]