AIM: To bring together the various stakeholders for the anticipated disruptive financial platform to be effected by a successful cryptographic solution to the challenge of digital currency, and to:

• Conduct cross-disciplinary discussions of the implications of this new platform

• Develop community awareness and outline a readiness program to handle a fast spreading digital currency

• Develop guidelines and standards for various types of transactions, for billing, for taxation, for movement and storage of money, for anonymity and trackability management, for dispute resolution, for the credit market, for virtual banking, for newfound investment and risk mitigation instruments, and for criminal, fraud, and national threats countermeasures, associated with digital currency.


Background: The last cryptographic roadblocks on the path to a viable digital currency have all been removed according to certain developers, or about to be, according to more cautious observers. Before we know it, bit-money will challenge the major world currencies with an international offering -- fundamentally more flexible, inherently more convenient, and spectacularly more empowering than metal coins, paper bills and "clouded" account-based book-keeping.

Much as Noah built his ark before the flood, so it is of prudence and even of necessity to assemble a forum of bankers, finance and payment thinkers, fiscal experts, and financial fraud specialists to examine and specify the desired framework for digital currency, to insure smooth and seamless transactions, effective and secure storage of transactional value, and a fair, appealable, and enforceable resolution of conflicts and disposition of settlement. The flip side of the convenience and increased flexibility of digital currency is the new temptation for fraud, crime and tax evasion. These issues must be properly addressed before a digital currency rises to mainstream status. A misguided public craze into an unaccountable form of currency is a prescription for economic and political chaos.

We have seen enough examples where no sooner has the technology cracked its eggshell than by a viral tsunami the world went 'on fire' (twitter, eBay, texting, GPS). Expect no less from the digital currency offering that would (soon) successfully negotiate its last cryptographic hurdles.

We urge you to pitch in, join us, participate in this forum -- give us the power of multi-disciplinary deliberation, of community wisdom. Be alert to the financial asteroid with which our banking, finance and payment system is on a collision course. Be counted!


Organization: the Digital Currency Forum is being organized by Prof. Gideon Samid, CTO of AGS Encryptions Ltd. And of its newly incorporated subsidiary BitMint Ltd. Gideon Samid is a leading computer security consultant, an innovative cryptographer (Equivocation ciphers, US PTO 6,823,068, The “Chemical Wallet”), and an innovation productivity expert (The Innovation Turing Machine). Prof. Samid authored the critically acclaimed book "The Unending CyberWar", he write a monthly security column in Digital Transactions Magazine, teaches in the University of Maryland, and is a member of the department of electrical engineering and computer science at Case Western Reserve University.