Re: Web Payments Telecon Minutes for 2012-04-17

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 7:31 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>wrote:

>
> Manu Sporny:  MintChip is supposed to be fairly anonymous which
>   is good news, like cash.
> Manu Sporny:  bad news is that if you lose your card it's just
>   like losing cash, it's gone.
> Manu Sporny:  it's meant for smaller amounts on cards, several
>   hundred dollars at a time at most.
> Manu Sporny:  any questions on MintChip, etc?
> David I. Lehn:  how would we begin to integrate with them?
> Manu Sporny:  we could contact the Royal Canadian Mint and talk
>   to them ... we could have MintChip tied in as just another
>   currency, it is supposedly a virtual currency
> David I. Lehn:  actually I think it is in Canadian Dollars.
> David I. Lehn:  they have currencies that are listed in Canadian
>   dollars.
> Manu Sporny:  Pelle came to the same conclusion that it is its
>   own currency, I remember reading that as well.


It's a wallet technology. The fundamental building blocks are two messages,
the first is the recipient wallet requesting a payment, and the second is
the source wallet approving the request. It isn't clear to me how they're
solving double-spending unless they've got the wallet's private key
embedded in the chip along with enough transistors to have the chip do its
own signing and keeping its own accounts, so you can't get into it to copy
anything without destroying it in the process. Like, it's a FPGA sufficient
do do what it has to do.

Their protocol has eight bits reserved for currency identifier, but in the
first release only 0b00000001 is defined, as CAD.

I intend to bring up my marketplace in time to submit it, with the mintchip
system as the liaison to CAD, to their contest.

Please contact me directly if you would like to assist.