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Technology Stocks : Identix (IDNX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: brad greene who wrote (15588)	11/8/1999 4:41:00 PM
From: David	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 26039

Got this lead from a thread elsewhere on SI: If you go to www.aberdeen.com, you can find your way to a summary of a report entitled "The Dash to Digital Cash: Enabling Internet Microtransactions." Although the report dealt with digital wallets, here's a couple of excerpts I found interesting for us: "Anonymous digital cash software technology is also emerging. This technology allows banks to mint or issue private, non-reputable [sic], and uncounterfeitable digital cash to users. . . . [F]or ISPs and telcos with large installed bases, the digital cash value proposition may prove to be more compelling [than for the banks]." ================== If you can imagine banks issuing their own money electronically, you can bet they need a perfect non-repudiation scheme, one much more secure than a token or password system. Otherwise, they send out money and can't get it back. (I can imagine why Bank of America is testing IDT technology.) The other passage indicates to me that telephone companies will be very happy to let anyone make a call on any phone where the phone itself will recognize the user and allow the telco to bill the user -- also in a non-repudiable transaction. Fingerprint authentication would be perfect for that purpose. (I can imagine why a Motorola/IDT biometric phone on a British Telecom system operating under a Novell directory could make sense some day.) By the way, all discussions of 'microtransactions' bring to mind the Holy Grail 'per click' model that would maximize IDX market cap, if they can get to the inside of that system. I'll let the Federal Reserve worry about the implications of measuring money supply when individual banks issue private money electronically to individual users. What a nightmare to track!