Re: Full text of David Chaum's Congressional speech

[Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>]

From: "Rev. Mark Grant" <mark@unicorn.com>
> Now, I'm not sure of this, but as far as I can see, if I was a 
> blackmailer wanting to receive an untraceable payment I could do the 
> following :
> 
> 	I create my ecash serial number/hash
> 	I blind it with a random number
> 	I send it to the payer
> 
> 	Payer blinds it again and sends it to the bank
> 	
> 	Bank signs it and returns it
> 
> 	Payer removes their blinding and returns the result to me
> 
> 	I remove my blinding and send it to the bank for payment with
> 	no chance of being traced.
> 
> Will this work ?

I believe this will work, in most blinded-ecash systems.  Another way to
express it is you force the user to withdraw cash such that it comes into
your wallet.

There are some technical counter-measures though.  One is to have some
secure tamper-proof hardware which enforces certain kinds of ecash
transfers.  The above transfer would not be a legal one.  Only transfers
which would allow various forms of traceability would be allowed.

Another approach was described by Chaum in one of his papers.  I can't
remember the details, but basically the user had to go through a
preliminary transaction with the bank when he opened his account, to get
a whole lot of tokens which would later be turned into ecash.  He has to
get a lot of them because these will be for all the ecash he will use for
a whole decade (or whatever).  Then the withdrawal protocol is one which
turns a token into an ecash value.

The result of this approach is that the blinding is in effect fixed in
advance and there is no way to force different blinding under duress.  I
posted more detail on this to the list sometime last year but I don't
remember when unfortunately.

Note of course that this whole traceability business only works if you
have to identify yourself to the bank whenever you deposit the money.  If
someone allows anonymous banknote exchange then the whole "advantage"
goes out the window.  IMO payee anonymity will be a desired feature of
ecash systems and I think Chaum is making a mistake claiming that it will
not or should not exist.

Another quibble is that blackmail is not a good example.  The payor
doesn't want to blow the whistle on his blackmailer; the blackmailer is
doing the payor a favor by giving him the option of paying money rather
than having the damaging information revealed.  Often the payor will know
who the blackmailer is.

Hal