By Jon Matonis Forbes Thursday, April 12, 2012 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmatonis/2012/04/12/mintchip-misses-the-point-of-digital-currency/ A new digital currency from the Royal Canadian Mint dubbed MintChip boldly claims to represent "the evolution of 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 they don't have to. I am reminded of the Mondex experiment during the 1990s which is actually when I first met MintChip Challenge judge David Birch of Consult Hyperion. Originally and laudably, Mondex wanted to replicate the characteristics of physical cash via a smart card but due to centralized authorizations, it only embraced partial and contingent privacy for the user. The true test of any anonymous cash-like system is what happens when your device or digital tokens are permanently lost or destroyed similar to burning a paper $100 bill. If they can be recovered and returned to you, then you don't have full privacy. Then there was DigiCash and the brilliant blind signature protocol from Dutch cryptographer David Chaum. Combining a powerful centralized issuing mint...