The Millicent Protocols for Electronic Commerce

Many protocols have been proposed in the last year which address the problem of securely transferring money over a public network. Most of these schemes have similar goals: to enable transactions with properties similar to those achievable today using credit cards, to provide consumers and vendors with guarantees similar to those afforded by credit cards, or to translate existing payment mechanisms into electronic equivalents. The schemes vary widely in details; some schemes create electronic cash, some schemes work hard to provide anonymity for purchasers, some schemes protect consumers from exposing their underlying accounts to merchants, and some schemes ignore privacy issues altogether.