From cypherpunks Sun Sep 19 20:43:05 1999 From: Anonymous <nobody () replay ! com> Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1999 20:43:05 +0000 To: cypherpunks Subject: Re: ecash means anonymous & untraceable (Re: Will this replace banking X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=95280154629912 >I wouldn't say ecash has to use blinding, but I would argue it would >be a misuse of the word "ecash", if something which was revocable were >dubbed ecash. > >With that definition it is not technically possible to implement >electronic cash at all without tamper resistant hardware, because >reliance on a mint, or double spend database means your "cash" can >become worthless over night if someone (say a government) decides to >switch off a computer (the one holding the double spending database). There are soem alternatives which would come closer to this definition. One possibility is to make the double-spending database public. Whenever someone receives a coin they broadcast its value. The DB operates in parallel across a large number of servers so it is intractable to shut it down. The greater danger is that the mint would be taken over and forced to behave badly, say by issuing too many coins. This would degrade the money and make it worthless. Another possible form of ecash could be based on Wei Dai's b-money. This is like hashcash, something which represents a measureable amount of computational work to produce. It therefore can't be forged. This could be a very robust payment system and is worth pursuing further.