Spending almost one's entire working life in cyberspace, it's easy to forget how remote some of the everyday concepts there are from everyday life in the Real World (TM Microsoft Corp).

This, then, is the cyberspace consensus on how business will be done in cyberspace Real Soon Now.

You are browsing the Web. You come across something you want -- possibly a last-minute omigawd-it's-Vera's- birthday-tomorrow Federal-Expressed(TM) gift, but much more likely a chunk of information. You click on the button that says "buy".

You have an "e-cash" account which you prepared earlier, stoking it with real cash from your bank account. When you hit the "buy" button, software on your machine (which we can call an "e-purse") sends an encrypted message to the seller. Fiendish mathematics ensures that sellers can verify that valid e-cash has reached them, without being able to identify buyers individually (unless, that is, a buyer has tried to spend the same chunk of e-cash twice).

So, for example, in a couple of years you might be reading Internet Today Online. It would, probably, present you with the contents page and some short pieces for free: but when you wanted to read this article it could demand, say, the e-cash equivalent of 2p. (You could well have told your "e-purse" not to bother you for confirmation of amounts under 10p.) Perhaps Internet Today Online would keep 1p of that fee for its design and facilities work, and pass the remainder to the author's e-cash account.

Or, if either HotJava or the Internet Terminal concepts really take off, you could be "renting" software, object by object. Why pay hundreds of pounds for a spreadsheet program full of "bells and whistles", when you only use the most basic facilities, and those only once a year for fiddling your expenses against tax? If you suddenly need the bit of the spreadsheet which handles third-order differential equations, why not fetch it from the net and rent it for 15p for the one job?

If your work is producing "software" of any kind -- program code, well-researched reports, music, even Virtual Reality entertainment -- and if this model of net commerce turns out to be right, a significant proportion of your income will be in e-cash. So will a significant proportion of your business expenditure.