Wallet Based E-Cash System for Secured Multi-hop Cash Exchange

The majorities of contemporary proposed digital cash techniques have many disadvantages in being directly or indirectly account based or not anonymous and offer no offline peer-to-peer transferability. This is for the majority of users - in general - not acceptable. Such an approach fails to replace the role of cash in e-commerce systems. The basic result of this research is a new prepaid multi- hop (transferable) cash payment system solution based on hardware technology implementing an electronic wallet (e- wallet) to accommodate digital coins. Transparent cash transfer (exchange) protocol software can serve at any network device as Internet host, mobile device or any future general purpose communication link. The result is a peer to peer (P2P) electronic cash transfer equivalent to a physical cash transfer in public use. This e-cash system could be a possible alternative to the physical coins & bills. It is a multi-purpose inter-operable digital cash payment scheme for domestic usage. The system is suitable for low value (micro payments in the 1 cent range), as well as for larger payments, regardless of the communication platform or transmission medium.