Whats happening in the realm of electronic cash now?
Ito: I think a lot of people are approaching the discussion about digital cash a little bit backwards. It’s not going to be a technology-driven trend. It may sometimes look like it at the beginning, but the market-driven trend is happening in a more subst antial way. All of the issues associated with digital cash — anonymity, lower cost of transactions, security concerns, and so on — technically, these can be cleared without much investment. Companies like DigiCash and Mondex are bringing new technology to the marke tplace, but in the US, Visa and MasterCard have decided that they’re going to have stored-value cards. So Mondex’s value in the marketplace is not clear anymore. And while DigiCash has a blank signature anonymity patent, it’s not clear overall how much ad vantage that gives them. What kind of costs are involved in doing online transactions? Ito: In general, transactions over networks are getting cheaper. NIFTY-Serve, for example, in some cases used to take an 80% service
