[638] in Cypherpunks
Re: Digital cash issuess...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Wed May 26 20:02:39 1993
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 26 May 1993 16:25:41 PDT."
Reply-To: pmetzger@lehman.com
Date: Wed, 26 May 1993 19:51:20 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com>
Eric Hughes says:
> >As a consequence, our
> >cash system is much more efficient in both computation and
> >communication complexity than previously proposed systems."
>
> I take this with a grain of salt; see below.
>
> >In our opinion, the most interesting of
> >these is that the entire cash system (including all the extensions)
> >can be incorporated straightforwardly in a setting based on wallets
> >with observers,
>
> I am not surprised that they find this interesting; David Chaum has
> patented all the observer protocols.
>
> Having read these protocols in the original, I can say this is not
> much of an advantage. The observer protocols are tremendously
> expensive computationally. Anything you build on top of it won't be
> any faster.
As I understand it, "observers" are built in to supposedly uncrackable
hardware built into a smart card -- and I'm not a big fan of the
notion that you can make hardware non-reverse engineerable...
Perry
