Systems allowing individuals to anonymously
pay for goods or services by transmitting a cash number from one computer to
another are permitting business exchanges through the use of anonymous digital
cash certificates. One feature of digital cash certificates is that, as with
tangible dollar bills, they are anonymous and reusable. Although credit cards
can be traced to a single owner, as with real money digital cash certificates
of varying denominations can be recycled. When an individual purchases digital
cash certificates, money is withdrawn from a bank account. The certificate is
then transferred to a vendor to pay for a product or service. The vendor can then
deposit the cash number in any bank or retransmit it to another vendor, and the
cycle of transmission can continue.
Combined with encryption
and/or anonymous remailers,
digital cash allows cybercriminals
to make transactions with complete anonymity. This is a common means of not
only trafficking in stolen intellectual property obtained on the Web but also
extorting money from targets.
In May 1993, for example, Timothy May wrote a piece about an
organization called BlackNet that would hypothetically engage in commerce using
a combination of anonymous digital cash, anonymous remailers, and public key
cryptography. Although May said that he wrote the piece to disclose the
difficulty of “bottling up” new technologies, rumors on the Internet spread that actual BlackNets
were being used by criminals for selling stolen trade secrets.
See Also:
Anonymous; Anonymous Remailers; Cybercrime and Cybercriminals; Encryption or
Encipher; Internet.
Jupitermedia Corporation. Digital Cash. [Online, September 1, 1996.]
Jupitermedia Corporation Website.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/D/digital_cash.html; May, T.C. BlackNet Worries.
In P. Ludlow (ed.), High Noon on the
Electronic Frontier. Boston: MIT Press, 1996.
