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A Cashless, High-Value, Anonymous Currency: How?
jfruh writes "The cashless future is one of those concepts that always seems to be just around the corner, but never quite gets here. There's been a lot of hype around Sweden going almost cashless, but most transactions there use easily traceable credit and debit cards. Bitcoin offers anonymity, but isn't backed by any government and has seen high-profile hacks and collapses in value. Could an experiment called MintChip brewing in Canada finally take us to cashless nirvana?"
So ice cream for currency?
Theft, yes. Bitcoin itself ever hacked, no.
Honestly, you will NEVER have a digital cashless anonymous currency. It just cant be done. bitcoin is proof that it cant be done.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Gold:
[x] Cashless
[x] High-Value
[x] Anonymous
I have been waiting for the moment to happen, I have a large collection of Disney Dollars saved up for this moment!.
There's been a lot of hype around Sweden going almost cashless, but most transactions there use easily traceable credit and debit cards
Since when does "cashless" mean "untraceable"?
... what the best way will be, any anybody who professes omniscience on this is lying to you. We'll have to experiment to find the best solution.
If you're in the US, ask your legislators to support a short act to make such experiments legal. Right now, trying to figure this out is a good way to land in prison.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
For the sake of discussion: what is wrong with cash and/or what is the benefit of doing away with it?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
How is one supposed to pay for these things with digital currency? Pimps and drug dealers love paper trails!
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Without government backing, it's difficult to find sellers of physical goods that accept the currency. Sellers of physical goods need to pay tax, and their suppliers in turn need to pay tax. Because only a government-backed currency is good for paying tax, companies choose to standardize their operations on one currency.
Why not use what it all comes down to in the end? Watts. Secondary benefits would be that there would be a huge push to make transferring and storing more efficient and people would actually be able to correlate what they're buying with the cost.
"Bitcoin offers anonymity, but isn't backed by any government and has seen high-profile hacks and collapses in value."
"...isn't backed by any government..."
Sounds good to me. Certainly true anyway.
"...has seen high-profile hacks..."
Bitcoin hasn't been hacked, some Bitcoin websites have been hacked.
"...collapses in value."
There was certainly that big bubble, but other than that it's been fairly stable. Certainly for the last many months.
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgCzm1g10zm2g25
by Cyphase ( 907627 )
Is a benefit of Bitcoin.
I can't figure out if this is a cleverly disguised Bitcoin advertisement or not....
I have not touched actual usd in almost a year. Everyone takes credit cards, even at farmers markets. For others, checks work.
Currency should be based on units of energy. Assuming there is no such thing as "free energy" this should make for a universally balanced currency that would avoid all the problems associated with fiat currency.
What other need is there for anonymous currency other than to commit crimes (including tax avoidance)?
I suggest that a civilized society has no need for what you ask for. Like it or not, we have chosen to have governments, taxation and regulation. You'd better get used to it because it is here to stay.
A cashless, high-value, anonymous currency, how??? NO!
Not being "backed" by any government is nothing less than the very first prerequisite of anonymity. Governments don't monopolize the business of currency and central planning (by force) for your benefit. They are in the business because it's absurdly profitable -- especially when you can print more currency out of thin air and use it to pay off your debt (something no private business could ever do without immediate financial punishment).
Why is it so often blindly repeated the bitcoin is anonymous? Every transaction has an explicit source and destination, and while these identities are bare public keys, tracing the flows through the network and assigning real-world identities at the exchanges is trivial.
I prefer an oak chest full of gold coins, which I will defend with a .50 cal. black powder muzzleloader double charged with 1/2 inch carpet tacks. Come and get it. I beg you.
Slightly Bored
Yesterday, I got a cheap dinner with a friend; it came out to about $5 for each of us. I handed the cashier a credit card, since I have not been to an ATM in quite a while, and he gave me a dirty look.
That anecdote illustrates the problem. On the one hand, we have a cheap, anonymous, private way to make payments (cash), but it requires us to have physical paper or coins in our pockets. On the other hand, we have electronic methods that require a connection to an online transaction processor, which results in higher transaction costs and poor privacy protections.
That is why digital cash -- the real kind, not the Bitcoin kind -- is so useful. It allows private, electronic payments to occur online or offline (in the sense of two smartphones performing a transaction over Bluetooth), with all the advantages of cash and all the advantages of the current electronic payment system.
Palm trees and 8
Bitcoin is stupid because it has no intrinsic value. Whatever it is will have to have intrinsic value to start. Nothing electronic has intrinsic value unless it's convertible at any time and any place to something that is intrinsically valuable like gold, cash, silver, etc.
I'ts frickin Friday afternoon FFS! I've been waiting for my obligatory Bitcoin article all week. What took you so long?
Why is Slashdot so fascinated with this alternative currency crap? Is Timothy lookin to score some weed?
We already have the option(choice is good) to use cash(anonymous) or cashless(electronic) currencies(plural). What motivates me or the man on the street to want anything more?
also: bitcoin
With the currency troubles in Greece and Spain, a "cashless society" is much further off. One plan for Greece is to suddenly convert the bank account of everyone in Greece from euros to drachma, then immediately devalue the drachma. Since this is well known, everyone with any money is pulling it out of Greek banks.
Keeping money in "the cloud" means someone else controls it. For a good laugh, read the EULA of WePay, a wannabe PayPal competitor. Or those of Dwolla, which is a pseudo financial institution run out of a hacker space in Iowa. The terms offered by most psuedo-banks in the "cloud" are awful.
Cashless, high value, anonymous. Available at WalMart.
"Oh! grandmother," she said, "what efficient banking you have!"
"The better to track terrorists with, my child," was the reply.
Notice the three words after "legal tender" on Federal Reserve notes: "for all debts". Technically, only businesses that extend credit have to accept legal tender. If a business never gives credit, such as a business that requires payment in full before services are rendered, it's my understanding that it need not accept legal tender.
Bitcoin offers anonymity, but isn't backed by any government and has seen high-profile hacks and collapses in value
Clever wording there. Yes, you could say bitcoin "has seen high-profile hacks," but you couldn't say that bitcoin has been hacked.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
If you don't check to see that the transfer has been confirmed, sure, but that's no different than putting a bill on the counter and then snatching it away. It's not a hack, and you can't do it to someone that doesn't allow you to.
Why?
If anonymity is that important to your transaction, cash is still the way to go. If digital anonymity is what you want, then you need an escrow holder that will take cash and convert it to some form of one-shot unique digital account without any personal information involved.
If you want digital, anonymity, and convenient, well good luck with that. The combination of the 3 just screams "counterfeit". Like the old saying goes, pick two.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
> "Could an experiment called MintChip brewing in Canada finally take us to cashless nirvana?"
When you see a headline in the form of a question, the answer is always "no".
It means the writer doesn't have enough (any?) evidence to back up a conclusion, but the conclusion will attract readers, so he posits it in the form of a question.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
"Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat!"
"But that trick never works!"
"This time for sure!"
It is an abstract representation of value that only has meaning in the context of a society.
It has no meaning or value in and of itself: can't do much with a sack of gold in the middle of the Sahara, unless you meet some tauregs, which brings us back to the point: whatever you agree is a medium of exchange has to derive meaning in terms of what other people think of as value.
Gold has ancient meaning, but ones and zeroes have to stand for something else: a sack of gold in a bank somewhere.
Which implies accountability, traceability, authority.
Without those things, no one in their right mind will accept your currency.
You have to know what currency actually means, and you can't design currency that defies those meanings, or what you have isn't really currency. Except amongst other idealistic clueless fanboys of alternacurrency, but this is a fringe group playing silly games, not actually making something that will replace real currency at large.
There is no trust in the parameters you have outlined. And with no trust, no trade.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Never happen. Having a currency out of bounds means there is no way to know what's going on with the currency. Is someone counterfeiting it? hording it?
And cash isn't really anonymous, never has been. Ask Al Capone.
How do I knw this? bcasue I was on a team that did it. Create a smart card system(first to be used by a financial entity) and you could use it to pay a shop keeper, get paid from a shop keeper, and use it for bank transaction.
So what happened, like in a day, was that people stopped using banks. Why use a bank when you have a card that can get money on and off it?
Sure, the bank had the physical currency in place, but who had what? you can't loan money that's on the consumers card, but you don't know how much is in the costumer vs. shop keeper. What's an asset? How is interest applied? How do we know the amount of currency out there matches what's ib the bank? Who do you do a currency swap?
So we quickly rolled out a patch the mad it so you needed to go to the bank to add currency.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm not sure that's a bad thing anymore given what governments around the world are doing to people these days. I wish it was feasible to move all my money to bitcoin, honestly. Banks and governments can't freeze it at will.
This is misleading as all hell. Bitcoin itself has never been hacked. And pretty much every non-electronic currency collapsed in value in 2008. I'm not sure bitcoin did. It's new, but it's totally usable and stable enough.
Having used bitcoin personally for several things, I have nothing bad to say about it except that it's a little bit slow for transfers to happen. Still way faster than a bank and it operates 24/365.
Question everything
No responsible government would allow this to happen on their watch. Why would I want to take away one of the best tools law enforcement has for dealing with organized crime, arms trafficking, and other socially dangerous activities? These things are real, and they really get people killed. A financial system which can be used to track such things down is a social good, and should not be undermined. Bitcoin and similar are money laundering schemes, and can and should be stamped out.
I remember reading academic articles from a conference on Financial Cryptography back in the late nineties.
The conference was being held in an offshore tax zone, and that was reflected in the article subjects...
One of the articles was making an interesting point: even in the total absence of legal hurdles, truly anonymous
money can only claim a small percentage of a market economy. That is because, in typical market economies,
Credit is an important force. As a rule, people and organizations (financial or otherwise) will NOT lend money
to anonymous people.
So although there is some space for anonymous currency, and people should fight for the last slices of privacy
they can have, it would be surprising to see anonymous currency become more than a specialty niche.
any article that starts with a question (Is mintchip the super magic of the future?) can always be answered with NO
also why do we want cashless? cash is anonymous and it just works. it works if the power is off or if the phone line is screwed up. it works in the middle of fucking nowhere. some cash (euro and usd) even works in many other countries.
I see this whole operation as something to sit back at and wonder what's with this myopic centralization ideal. Bitcoin itself, the protocol, is a proof of concept that will be, as a protocol, hacked itself when SHA-2 gets cracked or whatever, sure - But it was also only ever really meant as a proof of concept, and from what I gather from IRC logs, satoshi nakamoto left the scene because people were taking it more seriously than in that intended capacity rather than pulling through with a multiplicity of innovative cryptocurrencies, completely separate from bitcoin in the same vein. Ultimately, I see a solution like that running directly at contention with things like this, which seems to me to be what those wannabe demiurges who wish to control godlike technology they simply don't really get along with their stone age emotions and medieval beliefs.
When Linode got hacked I lost something like a couple bitcoins. Oh well, thought it was kind of funny, to be honest. But what I've noticed way more of than bitcoin hacks (Occassional exchanges etc getting hacked, or wallet.dat files getting ganked up), is all the recent SSL certifier hacks - The fact that they rely on the canadian mint's SSL certs seems like a major weak point to me in the whole taking this deal seriously. On top of that, the bitcoins I still have: Those have been reliably floating about 3 to 6 dollars above the price of the Canadian dollar since the whole bubble pop everyone keeps calling a crash. haha.
Gratuitous, I know
throw the baby out. The bathwater is cold
It's more like saying the first airplane didn't cruise at 30,000ft is proof that it is a failure. Expecting something like Bitcoin to be at a level of adoption greater than it is now is ridiculous. Sure there were some idiots that thought so an bought them up to $30 a year ago. After the hype was corrected, Bitcoin has been puttering along slow and steady above the trees.
Seriously, what kind of self-respecting website won't let you make a donation in Flooze? Dammit it's good enough for Guinan!
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Oh, wait, they tried that in a movie.
Baver
Stolen != hacked, anything can be broken into and this is what happened. The currency of bitcoin itself has never been proven to be so flawed that it should be abandoned. A good economy can sustain losses and move forward, this is what bitcoin has done. We are really splitting hairs here with these new and improved currencies. Saying that bitcoin was hacked is like saying that Madoff "hacked" the dollar bill or that the banks "hacked" the economy with their bailouts.
once again, the sandwich heavy portfolio pays off for the hungy investor. - Z
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm personally a big supporter of using cash. I use it at every opportunity, even if that means going out of my way to go to an ATM.
I havn't heard a convincing argument for cashless yet. Cashless isn't anonymous, requires both parties to use special devices or services,, and ties us into the banking system and thus gives an already overinfluential sector more power than it deserves.
Here in the UK, banks and credit card companies charge a percentage to the retailer for using a card machine, which of course customers end up footing the bill for. Why support banks any more after all the destruction they've wrought?
Full Communism. B)
The cashless future is already here. All of US dollars bills and coins account for less than 5% of dollars. The rest are digital. One professor of mine said it's as low as 2%.
Could an experiment called MintChip brewing in Canada finally take us to cashless nirvana?
Governments WANT transactions to be traceable.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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Right now a organization like MasterCard or a Federal Reserve Clearing House verifies the electronic certificates shuttling through cybersapce. i am not sure I'd trust a distributed verification like in bitcoin.
But the trouble with trusted 3rd party is that they can collect information about the transaction. Then it isnt anonymous.
When you see a headline in the form of a question, the answer is always "no".
WTF are you talking about? So the answer to these headlines is always "no"? Yes, they are headlines. Yes, you are a simpleton.
Could Romney be the next president?
Could Apple be headed for a crash?
Can Google beat Amazon at its own game?
Could this be the next iPhone?
Could Facebook be testing a 'Want' button?
Could this be the end of Obamacare?
This would put banks in control of ALL money. That's a Very Bad Idea. If you can't "hide it under your mattress", you essentially have ZERO privacy.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Folsom Prison had to give up on Cash ever coming back as of 2003. Now it's just cigarettes.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Platinum is rarer and has more uses (as a catalyst etc) so will never lose value.
I think that an anonymous cashless system will be great and is a very good idea but it would not, in any way, make me consider not carrying cash in my pocket. I would also still carry that piece of plastic that I use to pay for petrol etc. I like to have options and love this idea but cannot see why I would want a cashless system. I am still going to pay for a beer with cash or a newspaper.
I was one of the Luddites that fought to keep chequebooks... I love being able to send them through the post. I want more options, not less. Old options will die out through natural loss of interest when better ones take over but cash will stay for a long time.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Energy would make an excellent currency when we develop a suitable means of storage and transfer.
... ?").
We'd probably still want to keep it in banks, though. Easier to distribute from central locations, and you don't want it too portable ("is that a Terajoule in your pocket or
Hoarding: The emotional pejorative for 'savings'.
He's right... the answer isn't "no", it's "probably not" or "very unlikely."
Lets change every instance of bitcoin to bacon in your post.
I'm not sure that's a bad thing anymore given what governments around the world are doing to people these days. I wish it was feasible to move all my money to bacon, honestly. Banks and governments can't freeze it at will.
This is misleading as all hell. Bacon itself has never been hacked. And pretty much every non-electronic currency collapsed in value in 2008. I'm not sure bacon did. It's new, but it's totally usable and stable enough.
Having used bacon personally for several things, I have nothing bad to say about it except that it's a little bit slow for transfers to happen. Still way faster than a bank and it operates 24/365.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
To disprove you, all I have to do is to write the headline:
When you see a headline in the form of a question, is the answer always "no"?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's not logical. Bitcoin doesn't give you the basic freedoms to copy, to modify, and to distribute modified versions. Indeed, it is based on a DRM scheme preventing people from copying and manipulating them!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I remember using this way back when in the Netherlands (before the year 2000). You had loading stations where you used a regular debit card to load up your "Chipper" and that was used at retail locations to pay without having to enter a PIN code.
The trick was of course that it was tied to your debit card.
If you HAVE no more cash to load it, there is NO way to load it anonymously.
Just went to Wikipedia: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fnl.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FChipknip&act=url
It's obviously cashless, certainly high value, and mostly anonymous.
Governments have never demanded that citizens give us their private holdings of gold.
Oh wait, nevermind
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
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Bah, if you got too many "species" of gold, but them together and turn up the heat. Let nature takes its course and you will end up with a nice homogenous species of gold. Works with people too.
You "fixed" it to "but and", huh.
I wish the BitCoin people could understand this. An ideal currency is one that remains stable in relation to whatever it is you choose to buy. You don't WANT your currency to appreciate in value if you want to use it as a currency instead of an investment. A "currency" with guaranteed massive deflation (because the currency cannot scale with the size of the economy) is simply destined to never be a significant means of trade, except as an "in-between" currency useful only for money laundering.
When you see a person posting what someone else already posted, and forgetting the name of the law they're referencing to boot, the answer is -1 Redundant Asshole.
Awe some. Security through obscurity. What's to go wrong?
Only available on Windows, Android and Blackberry. Well Blackberry is over. I wouldn't trust a payment system on my cell phone and I am never ever going to use Windows again. Besides as the MPAA proved with Blu-ray there is no better platform to lose you security with than Windows. Not to mention that this mean the mint is out sourcing control of the money supply to the US as there will be no Canadian companies involved.
ummm. gold?
Cashless. Check.
High Value. Check.
Anonymous. Double Check.
Digital? No.. But that wasn't the topic?
Some form of digital split tally (see here) could accomplish this. The currency would be created when some lender provides goods or services (or even loans money for interest) on credit. That lender would keep some form of un-forgeable digital token (the stock) representing the debt, and the borrower would keep a corresponding un-forgeable token (the foil). The stock would entitle the bearer to receive payment from the borrower. The stock would have value and could thus be traded for other goods and services, with each transaction depending in part upon the trustworthiness of the original borrower. Digital split tally stocks of this sort would become essentially currency, because they can be traded for goods and services, with ultimate recourse to the original borrower. This doesn't depend upon authority, in the strictly governmental sense (except to the extent that every creditor depends upon the authority of law to force borrowers to pay their debts). But it does depend upon a certain level of trust. Ultimately the value of this currency is backed by the trustworthiness (or credit worthiness) of the original borrower. That may not inspire much confidence if the original borrower is Joe Blow. But if it is someone reputable, no problem. There should be some easy way to digitally track the feedback score of original borrowers.
[P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
And
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children.
Right off his own Archives
It's a tap card originally for public transport, but now widely used in stores, parking lots, post offices, fast food outlets, etc. throughout Hong Kong. It's very popular, and just about everyone in Hong Kong uses it every day.
It's anonymous in the sense that no ID's required to buy one.
But the cards are all numbered, of course, and if the Authorities know the number blind stamped on your Octopus card, then they can -- in theory at least -- match it with the payment record kept by Octopus. (Although Octopus is run as an independent, private venture, the HK Government effectively controls it with about a 60 percent indirect shareholding.) And with a maximum loaded value of HK$1000 (US$125) it's not really a high-value payment option.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
The one option nobody installing about is allow competition in money. There rally doesn't need to be a forced standard with legal tender laws. In this at gold, silver, bit coins, clam shells, and even federal reserve notes can all exist and be used. In that way
If there wasn't enough gold to function properly as money something else would step in.
The problem with fiat money is that it can be created at no cost. That is the ultimate power and will always be abused.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Bitcoin is on the rise recently...so we needed to have another article slamming it.
Looking at the price today, this article doesn't seem to have affected it as much as usual.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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In other words once all the money is digital it will all be trackable... So you wont be able to hide purchases. anonymous my ass... its not just about buying illegal things its about privacy. also as this gets more "around the corner" the use of paper money wont just die off quickly... Itll take a while. less and less paper money will be in use and then itll be easy to track THAT. arg
The best anonymous electronic money I've ever experienced are Asian RFID-based transit cards. They can't be used online but as a meatspace substitute for cash, they work great and are anonymous.
Does Bitcoin solve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
Casteism
We're not going to have a cashless society, until Obama's mandatory chip implant is fully implemented.. as I understand it, the law makes that 2013, so it's not far off. Then all transactions will route through your implant in (likely) your right hand between the thumb and forefinger.. Of course that means if you DONT have the chip you cant buy ort sell anything or get health care either
From a functional perspective, Bitcoin's mainly a transactional token system, not a value storage system. So while there's a bit of Ponzi / Pyramid scheme to it, that doesn't really affect most day to day use, because you're not trying to accumulate lots of Bitcoins as an investment, you're keeping a few around to buy drugs online or similar contraband, and the convenience of a hard-to-trace electronic currency is more important than losing or gaining a few percent a week on your stash. If you're the drug seller, you're going to sell your bitcoins for cash, if you're the buyer, you're going to buy a few to pay your online pharmacist.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I blame the people who also thought having a caps lock key where the Ctrl should be and ~` where the ESC belongs on a computer keyboard was a good idea. But typewriters had a lot of variation even back with manual typewriters. My mom's old manual typewriter had a cents key, but it was made for Romance languages, so it also had accent marks, cedilla-ç and N-tilde ñ, and maybe one or two others. (I don't remember if it had numerical 0 and 1 or if you had to use letters l and O, or whether there was a degree mark, but it didn't have the Scandinavian vowel marks.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The poster may consider a cashless society to be some wonderful concept. I'm perfectly happy with cash. I use it all the time, for most purposes. About the only things I use credit and/ or debit cards are for work-related expenses and buying stuff off the Internet (both of which need to be traceable, for the goods to get to me, and for me to get back at bad businesses).
And long may it continue to be just round the corner.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"