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Eagle Cash

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Re: Eagle Cash

#91

Post by 2bitencryption »

ahelwer wrote: post #71

Microsoft uses something similar for their on-campus cafeterias. All Microsoft employees are issued a RFID card with a chip that functions as a door access card, visual ID (it has your photo/name/employee number on it), smartcard for 2FA (this is being phased out in favor of TPM-based device registration), and cafeteria payment system. You can elect to have some percentage of your paycheck automatically loaded on the…

I think the core difference is that "Eagle Cash" is not centrally managed - the balance is actually on the physical card itself. I imagine the MS cards is more of a "central account" that is accessed when you swipe.

I guess each "Eagle Cash" terminal has a certificate, and whenever you credit/debit the card, the terminal adds/subtracts the amount on the card, signs the new balance with the certificate, and then this can be verified at any other terminal.

In other words, you can't modify the balance on the card unless you have the secret certificate, which is only present on the authorized terminals. If you try to modify it yourself, you can't do it, because no other terminal would accept the card unless the balance was cryptographically signed with the cert.

That's my guess for how this works, at least. I wonder if each terminal has a unique cert that can be revoked if it is compromised.

Re: Eagle Cash

#92

Post by majewsky »

ouchjars wrote: post #61
AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m ESL, how far should the “thou should pluralize a loanword as it was in the original language” rule go? It seems to be not universal. I mean, it’s “hamburgers”, not “die Hamburger”, “robots”, not “roboti”, and “rubles”, not “rubli”/“рубли”.

Borrowed plural forms are most likely to happen with French, Latin, and Greek loans, and also those from languages that don't change words to make them plural, e.g. Japanese and Maori. Sometimes it happens with other languages, like the use of Hebrew plural rules for cherub/cherubim, but there's the best approximation.

> Sometimes it happens with other languages, like the use of Hebrew plural rules for cherub/cherubim

For what it's worth, the few times I've seen the plural of cherub in the English language (mostly in song lyrics), it was always "cherubs", not "cherubim". Not saying the latter wouldn't be acceptable: Wiktionary lists both.

Re: Eagle Cash

#93

Post by internet_user »

md_ wrote: post #72
jpkoning wrote: post #66

The US military has had some innovative payments ideas. An occupying force prefers to use a money that 1) doesn't dollarize the nation they are occupying 2) can be tracked, thus thwarting black marketeers 3) is lightweight 4) if they lose, the enemy can't reuse it Unfortunately, dollar bills are bulky, infiltrate local economies, and aren't enemy-resistant. So we get innovations like EagleCash, which solves a lot of…

Why is #1 a goal? I’m assuming because of some desire to maintain the independence of a central bank in the occupied country?

Dollarization of other countries is in the national interest of the US.

Re: Eagle Cash

#94

Post by internet_user »

jpkoning wrote: post #89
md_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is #1 a goal? I’m assuming because of some desire to maintain the independence of a central bank in the occupied country?

That's right. In the US's case, if it was protecting a weakened friendly country or trying to rebuild a not-so-friendly one, dollarizing the economy would have undermined the occupied government and interfered with the US's overall goals. Using cancellable paper certificates like MPC or a closed loop electronic system like EagleCash prevented leakage of US dollars into the local economy.

You couldn't be more wrong.

The US Army shipped 12 _BILLION_ dollar in cash, multiple cargo flights to Iraq filled with pallets of nice fresh stacks of cash.

but they care to avoid dollarizing conquered countries? LOL.

They just want control over soldiers finances, so that there are no black markets, no soldiers buying drugs and paying hookers, becoming targets for petty crime, or selling weapons/ammo/info.

Dollarization of other nations is in the US national interest, read up some congressional transcripts.

Re: Eagle Cash

#95

Post by mleonhard »

internet_user wrote: post #94
jpkoning wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right. In the US's case, if it was protecting a weakened friendly country or trying to rebuild a not-so-friendly one, dollarizing the economy would have undermined the occupied government and interfered with the US's overall goals. Using cancellable paper certificates like MPC or a closed loop electronic system like EagleCash prevented leakage of US dollars into the local economy.

You couldn't be more wrong. The US Army shipped 12 _BILLION_ dollar in cash, multiple cargo flights to Iraq filled with pallets of nice fresh stacks of cash. but they care to avoid dollarizing conquered countries? LOL. They just want control over soldiers finances, so that there are no black markets, no soldiers buying drugs and paying hookers, becoming targets for petty crime, or selling weapons/ammo/info. Dollariza…

Those cash shipments to Iraq were the Iraqi central bank withdrawing funds from accounts in the US. The money was Iraqi money, mostly from oil sales. They asked for it back. The US handed it over to the Iraqi central bank officials. Most of it was used to pay Iraqi government employees during reconstruction.

Re: Eagle Cash

#96

Post by webinvest »

ForHackernews wrote: post #59

This sounds like a better alternative to bitcoin! I guess it requires a trusted central authority, but for most users that's a feature not a bug, and it sounds like it has a load of advantages: - Faster transactions - Can work "offline" (to some extent) - No wasted energy calculating redundant sha256 - Able to rectify fraudulent transactions

Look at the Stellar Lumens Cryptocurrency.

Re: Eagle Cash

#97

Post by eric_khun »

dibujante wrote: post #70

Wait until you see what you can use your metro card for in Taipei...

Yes not only bus or metro, but almost everything. Taiwan put a considerable amount of effort to have a 1 card to rule them all. And it makes life so much easier[1]

[1] https://erickhun.com/posts/taiwan-youbike-bike-sharing/

Re: Eagle Cash

#98

Post by jl2718 »

md_ wrote: post #72
jpkoning wrote: post #66

The US military has had some innovative payments ideas. An occupying force prefers to use a money that 1) doesn't dollarize the nation they are occupying 2) can be tracked, thus thwarting black marketeers 3) is lightweight 4) if they lose, the enemy can't reuse it Unfortunately, dollar bills are bulky, infiltrate local economies, and aren't enemy-resistant. So we get innovations like EagleCash, which solves a lot of…

Why is #1 a goal? I’m assuming because of some desire to maintain the independence of a central bank in the occupied country?

Yes. Very much so. In the beginning of my first deployment, the provisional government of Iraq rejected the BSA, so we pulled out and I redeployed to Afghanistan. During my second deployment, the Karzai government significantly reduced the BSA, and all regular forces pulled out around me. Both times, one of the biggest issues was dollars coming into the economy through US contracts and on-base merchants. This is good for them at first, but it turns the country into an import economy, and kills internal business. You can see this effect visually in the buildup of trash from imports replacing sustainable practices. 1000-year-old family farms gone fallow and covered in trash mixed with human waste. We tried to fix this with teams of Americans going around teaching Afghans how to do all the things they used to do before the onset of foreign aid.

Re: Eagle Cash

#99

Post by Youden »

AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #56
gioscarab wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word medium comes from latin, its plural is "media", not "mediums".

I’m ESL, how far should the “thou should pluralize a loanword as it was in the original language” rule go? It seems to be not universal. I mean, it’s “hamburgers”, not “die Hamburger”, “robots”, not “roboti”, and “rubles”, not “rubli”/“рубли”.

Just curious, is your mother tongue a language where borrowed words are pluralized consistently?

I'm a native English speaker but also speak German and Russian and all three languages pluralize loanwords inconsistently.

e.g. in Russian, some loanwords are treated like native words, like "computer" or "restaurant", while others don't seem to have plurals at all, like "cafe", "coffee", "radio" and "coat" [0].

And in German, it depends a lot on the original language [1], just like English.

If your language is different, I'd be curious to hear how it works.

[0]: http://webhome.auburn.edu/~mitrege/russian/tutorials/0051.ht...

[1]: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/Wortbildung/Frem...

Re: Eagle Cash

#100

Post by Youden »

howlgarnish wrote: post #43
gioscarab wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word medium comes from latin, its plural is "media", not "mediums".

The word "media" has become shorthand for "communications media". While correct in the original Latin, trying to use "media" as the plural for "medium" in any other context in English is jarring.

That's just one context. "Media" and "medium" are common in other situations. For example:

- "A hard drive is one of the many storage media available for computers.", "Blu-ray is an optical storage medium".

- "This work of art is mixed-media", "the medium for this work is acrylic on canvas".

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