Here's a question for you, people. How do Credit chips work? I'd love to see this one be explained.

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Freedom comes at a cost. One must be willing to make that sacrifise for freedom.

Maybe they work like tickets. You insert them into a credit chip machine, and then you get a reciept (sp?).

As for what they look like, I imagine them looking like small gold bars .They vary is size depending on how much they are worth.

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To Escape Velocity: Nova and Beyond!
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Millennium. Its coming, prepare for it.
Coming to the (url="http://"http://www.ambrosiaSW.com/games/ev/chronicles.html")EV Chronicles(/url).

I had always wondered that. Maybe they work like this:

The Giver tells his banking computer that he wants to give away some credits. The banking computer makes up a HUGE number to represent this transaction. It is stored on a a disk called a credstick. The Giver gives it to the Taker and the Taker deposits it in his bank account. The banking computer uses the huge number to verify the transaction. Then the number becoms void.

The Giver gives the money and the Taker recieves it for this example.

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Signed,
Brian Schack
"DOS Computers, manufactured by millions of companies, are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form."
--The New York Times, November 26, 1991 (also quoted in MacAddict 4)

You mean like credit cards? Yeah, I thought about that...

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To Escape Velocity: Nova and Beyond!
--------------
Millennium. Its coming, prepare for it.
Coming to the (url="http://"http://www.ambrosiaSW.com/games/ev/chronicles.html")EV Chronicles(/url).

I think they work like prepaid phone cards. Instead of phone time they transfer money on demand -- up to the prepaid limit.

There is also probably something like a debit card, which I could use to make purchases, like I do now.

T.O.P.

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"Good mathematics is not how many answers you know,
but how you behave when you don't know the answer."

The Old Professor Houston, Texas

I think that credit chips look like Isolinear Chips on Star Trek. A certain amount of money is stored on one and is added to the person's total when they put it into their ship's money handling credit slot thingy.

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A signature like this is worth the envy.

Quote

Originally posted by Captain Carnotaur:
**You mean like credit cards? Yeah, I thought about that...
**

If you were referring to my post, that is not exactly what I meant. More like debit. You have an account and when you put money on a credstick you are really just making a new account with that total in it. The credstick holds the account number. The credsticks terabytes of data so the account numbers can be huge to prevent fraud.

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Signed,
Brian Schack
"DOS Computers, manufactured by millions of companies, are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form."
--The New York Times, November 26, 1991 (also quoted in MacAddict 4)

Quote

Originally posted by FatherQ:
**I think that credit chips look like Isolinear Chips on Star Trek. A certain amount of money is stored on one and is added to the person's total when they put it into their ship's money handling credit slot thingy.
**

That's what I thought they looked like too. And when you receive one you insert it in a device that puts it in an account installed in your ship. When you want to spend some you simply type the amount of credits you want and it gives you a credit stick with the right amount of credits in a chip in side the credit stick.

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Quote

Originally posted by Nova6:
That's what I thought they looked like too. And when you receive one you insert it in a device that puts it in an account installed in your ship. When you want to spend some you simply type the amount of credits you want and it gives you a credit stick with the right amount of credits in a chip in side the credit stick.

When you say, "puts it in an account installed on your ship" I question the security of this. If the information on your total money is stored on your computer, what is stopping you from tampering with it? Is it encrypted somehow. If so, how to you decrypt it to send to others with out the revealing the decyption method? Is part of it managed on a central computer? Maybe your computer holds the serial numbers of each credit? If so, when you gave someone a credit you could still keep the number. How would you stop ppl from using credits over and over? One solution would be to change them after each transaction. But how could this be managed easily without a direct connection to the server? Would this method work if either party was untrustworthy?

A system like this would be doable, yet complicated to design. Maybe Mr. Burch will tell us his secret.

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Signed,
Brian Schack
"DOS Computers, manufactured by millions of companies, are by far the most popular, with about 70 million machines in use worldwide. Macintosh fans, on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form."
--The New York Times, November 26, 1991 (also quoted in MacAddict 4)

Quote

Originally posted by Ellmist:
**A system like this would be doable, yet complicated to design. Maybe Mr. Burch will tell us his secret.
**

I think The Old Professor's 'prepaid phone card' analogy simplifies matters considerably. You are given a credit chip worth X amount of credits, just like the phone card. How it looks isn't all that important, but you have to think that it can't be too large, unwieldy, or complicated...if only because the cards themselves must be relatively inexpensive to make. The element that holds the info relating to the chip's worth would be pretty small; the rest of the chip would probably be devoted to encryption. I don't know if chips are dedicated to a particular user, or whether you could just give one to someone for his/her own use without signing it over somehow. You could take the chip directly to any financial services organization ('bank'), or transmit the data relating to the chip's worth over secure wireless (a long-distance deposit). Once done, the chip is void, empty...and then you do what with it? Are they as disposable as today's phone cards? Is there a black market constantly at work on ways to illegally reactivate old credit chips? Or do the darn things just disintegrate—in whole or in part—after the deposit?

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PlanetPhil
lousy weather, friendly natives