Token and Notational Money in Electronic Commerce
L. Jean Camp, Marvin Sirbu, and J. D. Tygar
Abstract
What properties of money are important for electronic commerce? We
argue that both transactional and privacy properties distinguish
electronic commerce systems. We provide a quick overview of the
history of money. We then consider privacy provided by different
forms of money, and socially desirable disclosure of information as
specified by legal reporting requirements. We classify electronic and
traditional commerce systems into two categories:
- token systems, which exchange markers representing value
- notational systems, where value is stored as notations in a
ledger or computer.
We analyze different forms of traditional money based on the degree to
which they protect the privacy and preserve transactional ACID
(atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) properties. Finally
we apply our evaluation criteria to two proposed electronic commerce
systems: Digicash, (Chaum, 1985; Chaum, 1992) a token-based system;
and NetBill, (Sirbu, 1995) a notational system.
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