CRYPTO: Money laundering and traceability

[hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes)]

>Chaum's arguments appear to apply to virtually any electronic cash
>system which can prevent double-spending.  They suggest that traceable
>cash will be the rule in any digicash system.  

That's true for transferable and off-line cash systems.  The same
argument doesn't hold for on-line systems.  There you can have an
exchange protocol to deposit a piece of digicash and immediately
rewithdraw it, blinding it again in the process.  There need be no
account with the bank for this to happen.

Eric