CyberCash

» see cybercash.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

on january 1 2000, while half the internet was breathing relief that the y2k bug had been a non-event, cybercash was the part of the internet for which it had not been a non-event. its merchant credit-card software, ICVerify, had a date-handling bug. transactions were getting double-recorded. cybercash had shipped a fix in 1999. plenty of merchants hadn't installed it. that was the beginning of the end.

the company itself had been around since august 1994. dan lynch and bill melton launched it out of reston, virginia, with steve crocker on as CTO. the pitch, ten years early was a consumer wallet on one side and a merchant credit-card processor on the other. a separate anonymous micropayment scheme called cybercoin lived in between. internet payments in 1994 meant either mailing a check or reading your card number to a phone agent. cybercash wanted to be the layer underneath. visa and mastercard had not yet figured out how they wanted online payments to work.

it was a public company by february 1996. the dot-com era propped it up for a while: the IPO market loved anyone with the word 'cyber' in the name, and the merchant software business actually generated revenue, unlike the wallet business. then the y2k bug hit and the dot-com bust hit. on march 11 2001 cybercash filed for chapter 11. verisign bought the assets a couple of months later. paypal eventually absorbed the verisign payment piece in 2005, which means the cybercash machinery quietly ended up inside paypal.

i was 17 in 2001 in turkey. i had a card that worked at the local bookstore. i did not have a card that worked online, because no online merchant in my orbit would accept it, because the entire infrastructure cybercash and its peers had been trying to build was still half-finished outside the united states. cybercash existed for a layer of consumer behavior that hadn't reached me yet. by the time it had, the company had been swallowed twice.

~ the case file ~

~ the y2k story ~

the y2k bug, which the rest of the world spent six months and several billion dollars preparing for, was supposed to be the moment some legacy mainframe somewhere mishandled a date and crashed a payroll. for most companies that's not what happened. nothing crashed. for cybercash's ICVerify product, what happened was more boring and more deadly: dates rolled over wrong and the same credit card transaction got recorded twice. customers got double-billed. merchants got the angry phone calls. cybercash had pushed a fix in 1999, but plenty of small merchants had not gotten around to applying it.

~ the wallet that nobody wanted ~

the consumer side of cybercash was the wallet, which was supposed to live on your desktop and store credit card details and let you click-pay at participating merchants. nobody wanted it. installing software to spend money was a worse experience than typing the numbers in. the wallet quietly stopped being the focus of the company by 1998. what was left was the merchant-side software, ICVerify, which was a useful product but not the one investors had bought into.

~ the verisign-to-paypal pipe ~

verisign bought the cybercash assets in 2001 after the chapter 11. four years later paypal bought verisign's payment business. the cybercash brand evaporated somewhere in there, but pieces of the original code and patents lived on inside paypal. the line from the 1994 reston wallet to the 2026 paypal checkout button is long and winding, but the line exists.

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