Patent ID: 8504395

Claim:
A system for facilitating a sequence of events, each event comprising a multiplicity of purchases made by a large, a priori known population, specific to that event, during a short, a priori known time interval at a known site, the population specific to an individual event comprising a multiplicity of a priori known users, the system comprising: an on-site event attendee data bank recording an ID and a pre-paid balance value for each individual user within the multiplicity of known users expected to attend an individual event; a data bank loader operative to set up for each individual event by loading into the event attendee data bank, IDs and pre-paid balance values, for users expected to attend said individual event; a multiplicity of portable receptacles issued to the multiplicity of known users respectively, at least one individual receptacle storing a user ID and a pre-paid balance value for a corresponding individual one of the known users; a first plurality of e-cash filling stations incrementing the pre-paid balance values of individual users in the on-site data bank, to reflect pre-payments made thereby; and a second plurality of mobile service provider workstations operative to read individual ones of said multiplicity of portable receptacles, to access the on-site data bank according to the user ID of each individual portable receptacle, to enter into a transaction having a value with an individual user if the user's pre-paid balance value accessed from the on-site data bank is positive, and to decrement the transaction's value from the individual user's pre-paid balance value in the on-site data bank.