The Financial Crypto community has been a buzz over the last few days over a new implementation of Digital Cash called Lucrative

Lucrative is a fully fledged implementation of Ben Laurie’s Lucre which is an implementation of David Wagner’s Diffie-Hellman variant of Chaumian blinding.

Chaumian Blinding is described in more detail here in the Cyphernomicon but essentially it is the algorithm that makes anonymous digital cash possible.

Lucre is important as it’s the first implentation of Chaumian blinding that is not thought to be covered by patents. Chaum’s original DigiCash company made him the most hated man in the Financial Crypto community. Allthough I have to say that I thought him a pretty nice guy (business practices aside) when I had breakfast with him at FC98 in Anguilla.

So Lucrative is here. It is a Java implementation which uses SOAP. I‘m trying it out and it seems allright. Patrick has a weblog describing his efforts. The whole thing should definitely be congratulated. I’m going to see if there is any thing we can do to work together. NeuClear would provide an excellent book entry backend for Lucrative.