Minting and Use of Digital Money

(canceled)

A method by which a mint entity that mints and redeems digital money collaborates with merchants, their customers, and credit-extending entities (CEE) to allow the CEE to extend credit to selected group of customers, so that these customers can shop with any participating merchant, the method comprising the minting of unpaid digital coins marked in their terms-of-payment as ‘paid on demand’ (POD), and the mint conveying said POD marked coins to a CEE, which in turn conveys said coins, per its risk assessment, to some selected credit-purchasers (individuals or organizations) such that the credit purchasers may use said coins with any participating merchant of their choice, and said merchant submits the POD-marked coins to the mint for redemption, and such that the mint, in turn, requests the CEE to pay the mint the nominal value of the digital coins submitted for redemption, and such that if the CEE pays the mint, the mint, in turn, pays the participating merchant, which, in turn, releases the goods or services to the credit-purchasing customer, and thereby concludes the credit based transaction, except that the CEE and the credit-purchasing customer still have to settle the credit-purchase between them.

A method to pay for utility consumption on a real-time basis by splitting digital coins at a rate that pays exactly for the utility measure being consumed;

• the digital coin being latched into a utility usage device equipped with a computing apparatus that matches the consumption of value bits from the latched digital coin to the real time consumption of the utility;
• the utility flow is stopped when no more payment bits are available.