Re: dbts: Geodesic Payments

["Eric S. Johansson" <esj@harvee.billerica.ma.us>]

At 12:52 AM 2/20/99 -0500, Robert Hettinga wrote:
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>At one point, Paul Harrison, Rodney Thayer, Vinnie Moscaritolo, Bob Antia,
>Fearghas McKay and I were kicking around this idea as an open-source,
>IETF-able, internet check protocol, called, if I remember it right, Internet
>Deposit Box, or IDBx for short. We sort of ran out of gas. Everyone had a day
>job. F=MA and all that. :-). Talk to Rodney about it. I think he, or Paul, has
>the none-dare-call-it-preliminary spec somewhere.
>
>The idea was that any cypherpunk with a bank for a customer could have a
>working "deposit window on the internet" in a few hours of hacking.

since Bob takes great pride in his flaky memory, I want to add one
additional reminiscence about that effort.  while Rodney and company were
working on a spec, I made a couple of stabs at a rough prototype (highly
nonsecure shell scripts but functional).  Bob is quite right that it takes
only a few hours of hacking to build a mail based check service.  The
majority of your engineering time goes into validating the cryptography and
implementation but not the actual building.

If you had the money and the connections, this is literally a six man month
development effort.

--- eric

PS Bob, you may need to forward this on to the lists that bounce me because
I'm not a subscriber.


Eric S Johansson	esj@inguide.com	  esj@harvee.billerica.ma.us
This message was composed almost entirely by NaturallySpeaking. 
DD xlation of k9 wisdom: "look homeward wrong aroma problem follow"

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