Re: Forgery, bills, and the Four Horsemen (Articles and Comment)

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

From: shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green)
> This is unnecessary, since there is no "true" ecash. DigiCash's ecash in
> its current form, the only version David Chaum is willing to licenese, is
> fully traceable. Popular Cypherpunk's myths nonwithstanding.
> 
> First, the recipient of funds is non-anonymous by design. Second, any payer
> can trivialy make the recipient of a ecash note known by revealing the
> blinding factor. For purposed of lawenforcement, DigiCash's ecash in no
> more secure than if the (insert horseman here) billed his fees to a credit
> card.

This is not completely correct; there is a degree of anonymity in
DigiCash's ecash.  That is anonymity of how a person spends his money.
Neither the bank nor the payor is in a position to learn who or where a
particular piece of ecash comes from (assuming that anonymous
communication means are used).

This is not trivial anonymity.  IMO the greatest privacy threat posed by
credit cards is exactly this, the tracking of spending information and
patterns.  With credit card payments a great deal of information can be
learned by the credit card company about what I do.  With ecash almost no
information is learned, only the raw amounts I spend.  And if I occasionally
make payments to myself even that is blurred.

Ecash is not all that we might hope it could be but it is more than a
myth that it allows untraceable transactions.

Hal