but now it is rapidly becoming commercialized. It has on-line "shops", even

electronic "shopping malls". Customers, browsing at their computers, can view

products, read descriptions, and sometimes even try samples. What they lack is

the means to buy from their keyboard, on impulse. They could pay by credit card,

transmitting the necessary data by modem; but intercepting messages on the

Internet is trivially easy for a smart hacker, so sending a credit-card number

in an unscrambled message is inviting trouble. It would be relatively safe to

send a credit card number encrypted with a hard-to-break code. That would

require either a general adoption across the internet of standard encoding

protocols, or the making of prior arrangements between buyers and sellers. Both

consumers and merchants could see a windfall if these problems are solved. For

merchants, a secure and easily divisible supply of electronic money will

motivate more Internet surfers to become on-line shoppers. Electronic money

will also make it easier for smaller businesses to achieve a level of automation

dead. An alternative to private-key cryptography is a public-key system that

Kerberos server, which sits between your computer system and the one you are

random number that it uses to multiply the coin serial numbers. A bank encodes

can validate approximately 1000 requests per second, with TCP connection

Everything may work fine if transactions use nice round dollar amounts, but that

replace paper as our most trusted medium of exchange.

appends the sum to the packet. The recipient performs the same calculation and

Some common words found in the essay are:
Virtual Internet-based, MIT's Kerberos, Millicent Scrip, Initially Internet, Data Interchange, Digital Equipment, Commercial R&D, Internet Electric-money, electric money, spending habits, secure hash, , consumers merchants, authentication anonymity divisibility, authentication anonymity, blinding factor, hash algorithms, security authentication, data packet, credit card, security authentication anonymity,
Approximate Word count = 1403
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)