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by arethuza 5224 days ago
Although not itself a currency, Mondex provided peer-to-peer cash transfers in the mid 90s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondex

As far as I recall, you could various devices to transfer cash from one card to another - including over telephone lines, but I think it died before anyone thought of doing Mondex over the Internet.

1 comments

I was part of the trial in Exeter from 96-99. This was only sort of p2p, it was used basically as a method of carrying "cash" without notes or coins. Everything still went through the central bank (Natwest I believe ran it?) That including records of every transaction.
We used to share an office with a company doing Mondex development - there certainly were devices produced (e.g. based on the Philips P100 'screenphone') that could do peer-to-peer transfers, don't know if that functionality ever went live though.

NB The P100 was an ADSI "desktop" phone:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Display_Services_Interfa...

Edit: I'm pretty sure I remember them having two P100s in a test environment sending cash back and foreward between them - presumably to ensure that no money was magically created or lost.