Is 'Digital Cash' catching on or not ?

Surf Guru.

Despite surveys showing that 24 percent of online surfers are also online shoppers, and that retail and commercial transactions on the Net could reach $180 billion within two years, electronic cash -- money stored on your hard disk or on credit card-like smart cards -- has been about as popular as the Susan B.
Anthony dollar.

According to one estimate, the Big Enchiladas of electronic cash -- DigiCash, FirstVirtual, Wave Systems, and CyberCash - have hauled in less than $5 million in smart-card business alone, for instance. However, they're quiet, very quiet, silence-is-golden quiet when it comes to saying how much business they do online.

The reasons for the holdup include the usual suspects: privacy fears (some 75 percent of Net users said they were fretting about general privacy issues online) and incompatibility. For example, if you used e-cash services from say, CyberCash, you wouldn't be able to deal with the businesses or financial institutions that employ DigiCash's system (unless you enrolled in its system as well). It's as if there were several dozen e-mail systems and you could only communicate with the people who use the same one you do.

Help is on the way, though. A trove of 30 electronic-cash companies have agreed to hammer out a common system that would allow the digital cash systems to "talk" with one another aswell as offer a standardized digital "paper trail" to verify the transaction.

Trails -- or the lack thereof -- may prove the biggest obstacle of all, according to the Institute for Technology Assessment. The Washington, D.C.-based group suggests that governments worldwide will may clamp down on the use of digital money if it finally does become popular. The reason? There may be "perceived risks to national monetary systems," says the ITA, as well as "the screams of frustrated law enforcement agencies... trying to stop money-launderers who no longer have to carry bags
of $100 bills through customs, but can send it from their PCs half a world away." Ahhhh, international consensus on money in cyberspace -- just the kind of fear that should keep digital cash tied up in various bureaucracies for *years.*

The Big purveyors of electronic cash include: DigiCash, FirstVirtual, Wave Systems, and CyberCash.

Source:"Ask the Surf Guru"