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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.
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.
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....
This man disagrees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum
Palm trees and 8
What can be done mathematically in an abstract environment is one thing, what can be done in the real world with competing interests and (rather importantly) physical implementations.. are often two very different things.
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
The main problem with anonymous currency is that is being pressed to be outlawed all around the world. The second problem, of course, is people.
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.
You would be surprised at how many people don't have bank accounts or credit cards. Both can actually be pretty hard to get if you do not already have them.
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.
"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
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
But that would make a really good YouTube video. You and David debating this in the middle of a 1 lane highway with a 18 wheeler bearing down on you at full tilt. It's the only way we'll settle this argument. With everyone dead.
/rimshot
At least my hypothetical non-sense has more of a chance of happening than BitCoin.
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.
I'm pretty sure that, in common law jurisdictions, it would be found that there is a common law right (established by tradition) to make payments using anonymous currency.
Whether the anonymous currency is metal or bits is immaterial ! :-) (to the legality of using anonymous currency)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I live in a "first-world" society, and bank accounts are ubiquitous here. If you have even a negligible amount of money (like, $100) you can get a bank account whenever you want. From my observation, it is extremely rare for people who receive and spend money on a regular basis to not have a bank account.
Lack of a credit card is more common, but they are also easy to get (if you don't have ridiculously bad credit). Example: my little brother who has no bills in his name and works at Walmart part-time was able to walk into his bank and get a low-limit CC with very little hassle.
Anyone who has a bank account can get a debit card anyway, which functions very similar to a CC for electronic purchases.
MintChip differs from bitcoin in one very critical aspect. Bitcoin is generated naturally. Scarcity is built into the model. MintChip works just like the Dollar (post silver standard). It's arbitrarily created by a central authority who can inflate or deflate as they see fit. So, bitcoin is proof of nothing. MintChip is just like anyother currency, but without a printing press. Bitcoin is entirely different.
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.
What part of the last 10 years did you miss where judges have been letting the U.S. government literally get away with murder. They sure haven't been any kind of brake on stopping the government from spying on its citizens.
Judges aren't saints, they are political appointees and they aren't any more reliable or trustworthy than the politicians who appoint them. If you put them on 3, 5 or 9 judge panels they get a little more reliable but if you manage to pack a 9 person court with 5 corrupted or partisan judges, all voting together, you are still screwed.
You should have zero confidence in letting one judge control anything important.
@de_machina
It probably can be done. But then would be explicitly undone by governments and insurance companies by reporting requirements. In effect that is the same as cash transactions. Lots of countries (notably in the Caribbean) take US dollars cash for transactions, the governments fix their exchange rates to US dollars, but when you pay your cabbie 100 USD he's certainly not declaring 100 USD on his income tax.
Prove to me that you only had 50k in income with a perfectly anonymous transaction system. Prove to me that you had 6 million dollars in expenses. Who did you pay this to, for what?
Prove to me that this money was stolen from you, and you just didn't spend it.
Prove to me that you have this much in income so that I can give you a loan. If I give you loan in Euros and you have income in dollars I have to price into that the risk of currencies changing relative to each other. If I give you a loan in Euro's and you only collect income in annonbitcoins how do I value anonbitcoins relative to euro's?
What if there aren't enough anonbitcoins in the system to support a growing population or a more productive economy? Who creates more? What control (or lack of control) do I have over the person creating more anonbitcoins? etc. etc. etc.
The simplest fully anonymous system would be one that gives everyone a unique ID, everyone connects to the central database that handles transactions (assuming perfect security to the database). The database logs no transactions, once a transaction is complete it is done and irreversibly one way, and randomly changes your unique ID after each transaction. No logging would make it fully anonymous (just like cash!), but everyone would have to explicitly trust the issuing authority (whomever controls the database) to responsibly manage it (just like the government!). If you mean a cryptographically untracably anonymous system I don't think that's realistically possible with todays maths. Every exchange that can happen *can* be logged, and since it requires unique identifiers it's possible to log the transactions and work backwords so to speak. To prevent effective logging you need to change unique identifiers unpredictably, and explicitly not log the changes.
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.
You "fixed" it to "but and", huh.
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.