I first covered MintChip a week or so ago and as more news has come I wanted to add a couple of things.

First of all @BurnsMod received the above Mintchip Devkit and wrote a nice piece about what it includes. It appears the USB version is basically a USB adapter to the MicroSD chip.

David Nicol points out that MintChip uses CAD on my last post.

Jon Matonis writes an important piece on Forbes MintChip misses the point of digital currency

However, digital currency is not simply about taking official money and making it useful for online and offline environments in a digitized form. The point of digital currency, and especially free-market digital currency, is to broaden the avenues for issuance and adoption of alternative nonpolitical monetary units. Most electronic cash systems already expand and revolve around the State-issued currencies although …

Imagine my suprise yesterday when all of a sudden the twittersphere was buzzing with news about MintChip the new digital cash system from the Royal Canadian Mint.

I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t at a FC ’98 listening to a presentation by a Dutch grad student on digital cash running on a Java Ring (remember those?).

Anyway while the system has some serious short comings I applaud the RCM’s very bold initiative here.

So what is MintChip exactly?

Basically it’s a combination of a Digital Cash protocol and a MicroSD card containing a secure wallet.

The MintChip site mentions the following benefits:

No personal data is exchanged in the transaction
There is no intermediary or requirement for a proprietary network and as a result MintChip is a cost effective solution to merchants
MintChip is designed to facilitate the payment of low value (e.g. less …