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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder if it literally means they were thinking of duplicating the (world's first) digital peer-to-peer currency: http://www.bitcoin.org

I think you forgot about digicash's product 'ecash'.

Claiming a 'first' in any field is difficult, to claim a 'first' in payment systems is a very tricky affair.

It may be that bitcoin is the first practical digital peer-to-peer currency but even that is up to interpretation, no doubt someone had something they launched that failed before it and plenty of people would disagree that it is practical as it is implemented today.

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ecash was not truly peer-to-peer. On the contrary, the concept relied crucially on centralization as ecash would have been withdrawn from existing banks & credit card companies: http://web.archive.org/web/19970111163957/http://www.digicas...

In fact, bit gold, RPOW, and b-money (from respectively Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, and Wei Dai) were the only similar ideas predating Bitcoin, but none of them were ever implemented... Which is why one can say that Bitcoin truly is the first implementation of a digital p2p currency, where everything, including the issuance of money, is decentralized.

Here is a google books link documenting ecash's peer-to-peer capabilities:

http://books.google.nl/books?id=4TJtnkaWpp0C&pg=PA115...

You could use your bank to host the software, but it was also possible to run your own.

Ecash was very much ahead of the curve at the time and it had features that we can only dream of today.

I do understand that the transfers were peer-to-peer. I could hand you eCash in an offline way, from my device to yours, as if I was handing you a bill, without going through a bank/clearing house network to authorize and validate the transfer.

But the issuance of eCash was still done by the bank. This is what makes eCash not 100% decentralized... I would compare eCash to the "pseudo p2p" Napster file sharing network which still relied on a central server (gasp!) to index the files, which allowed authorities to shut down the "p2p" network by closing down that central server.

"Real" cash is also issued centrally but nobody doubts that it can be used in a 'peer to peer' fashion for payments.

Anyway, I think we're well into 'no true Scotsman' territory here.

Real cash isn't peer to peer, is the point. Anyone can create bitcoin, without going to a bank. You can prefer a different term to p2p if you like, but parent's point was about the complete decentralization, not the word "p2p".

Although not itself a currency, Mondex provided peer-to-peer cash transfers in the mid 90s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex

As far as I recall, you could various devices to transfer cash from one card to another - including over telephone lines, but I think it died before anyone thought of doing Mondex over the Internet.

I was part of the trial in Exeter from 96-99. This was only sort of p2p, it was used basically as a method of carrying "cash" without notes or coins. Everything still went through the central bank (Natwest I believe ran it?) That including records of every transaction.

We used to share an office with a company doing Mondex development - there certainly were devices produced (e.g. based on the Philips P100 'screenphone') that could do peer-to-peer transfers, don't know if that functionality ever went live though.

NB The P100 was an ADSI "desktop" phone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Display_Services_Interfa...

Edit: I'm pretty sure I remember them having two P100s in a test environment sending cash back and foreward between them - presumably to ensure that no money was magically created or lost.

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