53 Second vid.
Had matching comms this morning for HRC/ SA/ Alice & Wonderland
[DARPA]
Before PayPal was founded in 1998, early electronic payment research and development centered on solving the security challenges of moving financial value over public networks like the internet. Two key areas of development, influenced by DARPA's cryptographic research, were:
Blind signatures: Computer scientist David Chaum, whose work was relevant to DARPA's mission, introduced blind signatures in the 1980s. This form of digital signature allowed a user to have a message (like an "electronic coin") signed by a bank without revealing the message's content. The bank could verify the signature later, but could not link the transaction back to the user, providing a form of digital cash anonymity. Chaum later founded DigiCash to commercialize this technology, though the company went bankrupt in 1998.
SET protocol: In the mid-1990s, credit card giants Visa and Mastercard collaborated with technology companies, including those influenced by DARPA-funded work, to develop the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol. SET was an early security framework for online credit card payments that used digital certificates and encryption to protect sensitive data. However, it was complex and costly, leading to its eventual replacement by simpler protocols like SSL/TLS.
DARPA's role was not to build a proprietary payment system but to advance the underlying technologies of cryptography and network security. These developments enabled the secure exchange of information that eventually made commercial e-commerce platforms like PayPal possible