Online commerce is currently supported by a variety of transaction systems some of the most well known being Visa, Paypal, Linden Dollars (Second Life) and e-gold. They all require that transactions take place via a central authority, all are supported by taxing transactions and they issue private electronic commodity currency. Commodity currency comes with a promise it will be exchanged for some commodity of value by the issuer. In this model, users of each system are bound to a single point of failure and are subject to whatever fees and charges the controlling entity wishes to impose.

This project demonstrates a decentralised currency model. The project uses the X.509 PKI standard, as used widely in the internet domain to certify entities and the X.509 processing is done with the Keyczar cryptographic toolkit.

Reports from two Australian National University Masters projects, Digital Payment Systems without Third Party Settlement and Digital Payment Systems - Token Generation and Transfer are available as well as presentation slides and plans.

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