Port 471 sits in the well-known ports range (0-1023), officially assigned by IANA to a service called "Mondex." Both TCP and UDP protocols were registered for this port. But if you scan for it today, you'll find nothing. Mondex has been dead since 2008.
What Mondex Was
Mondex was a smartcard-based electronic cash system invented in 1990 by Tim Jones and Graham Higgins at NatWest in the United Kingdom.1 The vision was radical for its time: replace physical cash with a stored-value card that could transfer money peer-to-peer without any central authorization.
You could transfer money between Mondex cards using special ATMs, computer card readers, personal "wallet" devices, and specialized telephones. No authorization needed. No network connection required. Just like handing someone a five-pound note, except the note was made of bits instead of paper.
The Brief Life
The system launched in a public trial in Swindon, UK on July 5, 1995.1 For a moment, it looked like the future. Trials expanded to Hong Kong, New York, Guelph (Canada), and several British universities. In 1996, Mastercard acquired 51% ownership of Mondex International and fully endorsed the scheme.1
Port 471 was assigned to handle Mondex network communications—the infrastructure that would connect terminals, readers, and backend systems in this new electronic cash economy.
Why It Failed
The world chose differently. Credit cards won. Debit cards won. Later, mobile payment systems won. Mondex never achieved widespread adoption beyond trials. Taiwan was the last place where Mondex cards still worked. On May 31, 2008, those cards were disabled.1
Port 471 became a ghost—a number in the IANA registry pointing to nothing.
What This Port Means Now
Port 471 is unassigned in practice. The official registration remains because IANA doesn't routinely remove historical assignments, but no active service uses it. If you find something listening on port 471, it's either:
- Legacy Mondex infrastructure that someone forgot to decommission
- An unofficial service repurposing an abandoned port number
- Something worth investigating
Checking What's Listening
On Linux/Mac:
On Windows:
If you find something active, it's not Mondex. Mondex is gone.
The Honest Truth
This port is a monument. It represents an entire vision of digital money that the world rejected—not because it was technically flawed, but because the market moved in a different direction. Mondex tried to make electronic cash work like physical cash: peer-to-peer, offline, no central authority required.
Instead, we got Visa, Mastercard networks, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay—all centralized, all online, all requiring authorization. Maybe that was better. Maybe it wasn't. But port 471 remains in the registry as evidence that someone tried.
The Internet is full of these ghosts—port numbers assigned to services that solved real problems, ran real trials, served real users, and then vanished when the world chose something else.
Port 471 is where electronic cash came to die.
Related Ports
- Port 443 — HTTPS, how modern payment systems actually secured themselves
- Port 22 — SSH, the secure protocol that won
- Port 20-21 — FTP, another protocol that mostly lost to HTTP/HTTPS
Frequently Asked Questions
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