Internet and Electronic commerce (E-commerce) are of increasing interest. It is expected that billions of USD will be earned in this new business market the next decade. The explosive growth of E-business will change totally and fundamentally the business environment of the 21-th century and this process has already began. Right now we are focusing that more and more information is accessible v...

What makes e-money special relative to cash? How does the introduction of electronic money improve the functioning of a payment system, in which cash is used as an incumbent payment instrument? This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to identify the essential features of e-money that improve the effi ciency of the economy. We build a micro-founded general equilibrium model to compare the ...

The starting point of this work is a case study (from France Télécom) of an electronic purse protocol. The goal was to prove that the protocol is secure or that there is an attack. Modeling the protocol requires algebraic properties of a fragment of arithmetic, typically containing modular exponentiation. The usual equational theories described in papers on security protocols are too weak: the ...

Emerging technologies, particularly the synthesis of cryptographic software and tamperresistant smart card hardware into the electronic purse, will make the cost of entry into the currency issuing 'market' quite small. Many organisations may then wish to enter this market, for example as a means of supplying credit (as envisaged by Frederick Hayek), of raising finance, or of encouraging custome...

Although recent data on electronic commerce (e-commerce) shows vital growth, the role of electronic money in e-commerce is still unclear. Critical success factors for electronic money found in the literature are briefly summarized with special focus on gold-backed forms of Internet-based payment systems. It is shown that the gold standard can be implemented as a currency regime not only for phy...