[5703] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Ecash without a mint
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wei Dai)
Mon Sep 20 20:39:49 1999
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 1999 13:52:43 -0700
From: Wei Dai <weidai@eskimo.com>
To: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
Cc: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net, cryptography@c2.net, dbs@philodox.com
Message-ID: <19990920135243.D762@eskimo.com>
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In-Reply-To: <199909201902.VAA20290@mail.replay.com>; from Anonymous on Mon, Sep 20, 1999 at 09:02:17PM +0200
On Mon, Sep 20, 1999 at 09:02:17PM +0200, Anonymous wrote:
> Yeah, neat idea! With b-money, newly minted value goes directly into
> someone's account, but if it was used instead to create an anonymous
> coin you would have an accountless system. In that case you don't even
> need the mint for the initial phase.
The account-based aspect is what enables the contract enforcement in
b-money. You would lose that by going to an accountless system. What is the
advantage of not having accounts (other than payer-payee unlinkability,
which can be obtained by using Sanders-Ta-Shma as the payment subprotocol
of b-money)?
> One problem though. For b-money, you have to expend resources equal
> in value to the money you generate. That means that if you wanted to
> re-create the U.S. money supply of a trillion dollars, you would have
> to waste a trillion dollars worth of computing cycles. Not exactly an
> attractive proposition.
Unfortunately it seems unavoidable unless you have a trusted party control
the money supply. You'd have the same problem if you used gold as the money
supply, for example.
> What you might want to do, then, is to let people convert other forms
> of money into these ecoins to get things going initially. Then use
> b-money to create more if they are needed over the long term. This way
> you avoid the huge startup costs with b-money.
How do you propose letting people do this without having a trusted party?
The only thing I can think of is broadcasting video clips of people burning
their paper money, but it would be hard to verify the authenticity of the
money being burnt.
