First known purchase of physical goods with cyberbucks

[Feel free to forward to anywhere you feel is appropriate]

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For some time now, Adam Back has been offering to sell RSA T-shirts for
cyberbucks (DigiCash's experimental anonymous digital cash system), but
no-one has had enough available to take him up on it. However, thanks to
the success of the ecm mailing list (ecm@ai.mit.edu) and WWW site
(http://www.c2.org/~mark/ecash/ecash.html), today I finally managed to 
collect enough c$ to buy one.

It was something of a feat to gather that many c$ in one place, as
the number of sellers is limited. There are many more buyers than
sellers, everyone wants c$, but few people are selling at a realistic
price. As it stands, we have managed to take a worthless currency (c$
are not backed with anything) and give it value based solely on what the 
market is willing to pay for it, due to its security, anonymity and ease 
of use advantages compared to the other digital payment systems on the 
Net. Once a DigiCash licensee starts offering to sell (and buy) ecash 
via VISA/MasterCard and chequing account, I could see ecash getting very
popular very quickly.

Using ecash once you've got the c$ in your ewallet/DigiCash bank
account is near instant. If used through the WWW forms interface as 
provided by the Windows and X-windows user interface, the transaction 
is as easy as clicking on a button. Instant buy, much more convenient 
than filling in credit card forms, talking to people on the phone, 
sending things in snail mail, etc, and anonymous too. Now you can 
even use the beta-test currency to buy and sell physical goods as well.

Anyway, if anyone knows of an earlier transaction of cyberbucks for physical 
goods than this (at 15:00 GMT 17th August 1995), then please let me know. 
Also, if you have c$ that you wish to sell, or have run out and want to buy 
some more, come along and join in the fun on the WWW site or mailing list...

	Mark

P.S. If anyone in the UK wants to buy a rusty but reliable FIAT X1/9
convertible, it's yours for only 5,000 cyberbucks...

(For the record, I have no connection to DigiCash other than as an ecash
 beta tester, and the ecash market is not supported by them in any way.)


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On Thu, 17 Aug 1995, Rev. Mark Grant wrote:

> 
> [Feel free to forward to anywhere you feel is appropriate]
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> 
> 
> For some time now, Adam Back has been offering to sell RSA T-shirts for
> cyberbucks (DigiCash's experimental anonymous digital cash system), but
> no-one has had enough available to take him up on it. However, thanks to
> the success of the ecm mailing list (ecm@ai.mit.edu) and WWW site
> (http://www.c2.org/~mark/ecash/ecash.html), today I finally managed to 
> collect enough c$ to buy one.

I just had a wicked thought. What happens when people combine challenge key
cracking with e-cash?

Lesse -- 2^40 keys = 1,099,511,627,776 keys.  Damien was able to get
850000-1.3 million keys per second.  Let's go for the low-end and
use 8000 keys per second which is in the range of his sparcstations
(a very common machine on the internet).  We "only" need 38,178
machines to crack the key in 8 hours.   Each of those workstations
is going to test 28,800,000 keys and we'll assign a nominal value of
$1,000 to cracking the key.  (Most people have $1k of room on their
visa or m/c, no?)  Splitting the booty 50/50 gives someone $500 
or about 1.79 e-cents per 100k keys tested. 

So, could 38,000 people be enticed into running a sparc-cycle
cracking daemon for a 1 in 38,000 chance at $500?  :-)