[117828] in Cypherpunks
Re: ecash deployment thread (Re: BlackNet Markets -- Organs? Kidneys?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Howie Goodell)
Sun Sep 12 04:59:52 1999
Message-ID: <37DB67BD.C513CF05@mediaone.net>
Date: Sun, 12 Sep 1999 04:43:41 -0400
From: Howie Goodell <goodell@mediaone.net>
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To: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
CC: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
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Reply-To: Howie Goodell <goodell@mediaone.net>
Anonymous wrote:
<snip>
> > > And the recent account of the Boston area comments by Andrew Odzylko
> > > on why digital cash is still not here are instructive. (That was
> > > another post, the report by Howie Goodell, that should have gotten
> > > more discussion.)
> >
> > I read it. My take on why ecash hasn't taken off is because it's a
> > slow starter, and the players have been going at it like a bull in a
> > china shop. (Spending vast amounts of venture capital, which the
> > fledgling ecash startup couldn't possibly hope to make returns on at
> > the rate they're spending money. So they run out of cash and fold.)
>
> That talk was mostly about differential pricing (charging more to some
> people than others, like hardback books costing more than paperbacks).
> Sure, this is marketing 101. But ecash has nothing to do with
> differential pricing; the one is a payment method and the other is a
> marketing philosophy. No reason was give in the posted notes why ecash
> would interfere with differential pricing. The whole thing seemed to
> be a giant red herring.
>
Note I posted these notes at
http://people.ne.mediaone.net/goodell/howie/ideas/Dr_Andrew_Odlyzko.html
As I understand it, Dr. Odlyzko's point is that companies' market power
and government restrictions will cause the electronic marketplace to go
somewhere quite different from the "Consumer is King" utopia we naievely
envision. Digital commerce will evolve in two directions, neither of
which fits anonymous digital cash very well:
1. Expensive products like airline tickets or cars will be sold
with complex pricing schemes in which the customer's identity is
known.
2. Inexpensive products like phone service will be sold by simple
flat-rate subscriptions in which the customer's identity is
also known.
In my much humbler opinion there will also be a large commoditized
segment, emptor rex, and anonymous credentials *could* provide even the
beneficial effects of price discrimination (products get produced that
wouldn't be if uniform pricing is enforced) with far less loss of
privacy.
Take care!
Howie Goodell
--
************************************************************************
Howie Goodell Senior Software Engineer HCI Research Group
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End-User Programming: http://www.cs.uml.edu/~hgoodell/EndUser
"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." (Sun CEO) Scott McNealy
