Anonymous says,
> It is still worth considering how to create anonymous payment systems
> which could be more compatible with other elements of present day society.
I think we can do this, indeed, we can achieve an even stronger goal: a payment
mechanism that will support anonymous payments for people so wishing, while
allowing other people to use non-anonymous payments (which will always have some
advantages), without allowing merchants to identify the anonymity-seekers.
The method is simple and can use any anonymous payment mechanism. Consider for
simplicity a buyer, seller and a billing server (payment system provider - bank,
telco, etc. - `billing system` is the term we use for this party in IBM Micro
Payments). The payment system supports pre-certified payments, which are
payments (to the seller) signed directly by the billing server. In this case,
the buyer's identity obviously does not need to appear in the pre-certified
payment (it is simply a payment - like a check - from billing server to seller).
So all the buyer really does is `buy` this pre-certified payment. Now,
obviously, if the billing system allows, the buyer may use anonymous payment
protocol to buy the pre-certified payment, in which case (and assuming all
communication is anonymized) we have complete anonymity (from billing system and
from seller).
We actually will have the necessary APIs in merchant and buyer to allow
integration of such an anonymous payment mechanism with the next release of IBM
Micro Payment (1.3, next month). We may later on implement this ourselves if
customers are interested, but frankly I prefer to see others implementing it;
for one reason, as you know, there are multiple patents regarding anonymous
payments, so it will be a pain to do this (in IBM).
Best Regards,
Amir Herzberg
Manager, E-Business and Security Technologies
IBM Research - Haifa Lab (Tel Aviv Office)
http://www.hrl.il.ibm.com
New e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
New Lotus notes mail: amir herzberg/haifa/ibm@IBMIL
