Re: Untraceable Payments, Extortion, and Other Bad Things

[Omegaman <omega@bigeasy.com>]

On Sun, 29 Dec 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:

> 
> Sure, but my interest is in the possible, not the dumb mistakes of dumb
> people. That some criminals will screw up and reveal their identities is no
> different from the similar possibility that some people will mess up in
> using remailers; doesn't alter the interesting properties of remailer
> networks.

Of course it doesn't.  But remailer networks are at a formative stage where
bad publicity (& disinformation) carries a lot more weight.  Think in terms
of remailer networks and digicash having "reputation capital" and you'll see
where I'm coming from.  Both the sensational nature of "THE NET" and the
efficiency of the net to spread information far & wide rapidly compound the
power of a carefully crafted publicity campaign

> Perhaps. But I note that various "outrages" associated with use of Swiss
> banks--Jewish gold deposits, banana republic deposits, tax avoidance,
> etc.--have not exactly driven Swiss and similar banks out of existence.
> Greed is a powerful lubricant. And there are of course various ways to make
> the traffic less obvious.

All of the above are well established in corporate circles.  Furthermore,
they're not widely used (relatively speaking, of course) or widely accessible.

> And, more importantly, the "doubly untraceable" nature of true Chaumian
> e-cash means that the Bank of Albania _cannot_ be frozen out of the banking
> system (assuming other banks are also issuing Chaumian cash). Any mechanism
> that would allow the Bank of Botswana, for example, to "know" that the Bank
> of Albania was buying untraceable Botswanabux would of course mean the
> Botswanabux were not untraceable! Once Bank of Albania can buy such
> untraceable currency, they can pay Ed off in them. Or variants of this.
> (The similarity of a network of Chaumian digicash banks to a network of
> remailers is obvious...indeed, Chaum's work on "digital mixes" preceeded
> his work on digital cash, 1981 vs. 1985.)

Yes.  But we were talking about one only "doubly untraceable" Chaumian
digicash system.  I feel that if such systems don't see wide and common
usage, they will fade away in favor off "singly untraceable" and like
systems. (or be pushed out, such as in the example we played with above).

One rogue bank, therefore, can be frozen out if others are not using
Chaumian cash.

One possibly and likely scenario is that partially untraceable Chaumian
style cash will begin to be widely used.  Once others using fully
untraceable systems come into play, the pot is muddied a bit.  (I guess I
need to re-read some of the recent releases about partially untracable
Chaumian cash to explore the possibilities represented.)


Happy New Year, all.
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