On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Adam Back wrote: > Tranferable off-line coins allow all kinds of cool anonymity features > as described above, I also argued above that the linkability > deficiency can somewhat defended against. > > And transferable off-line coins add yet more flexibility, while again > not preventing online clearing for those that prefer it. While some > of the features have the linkability artifact, those features are > optional and the user has free choice to select methods to avoid > entirely or defend against linkability by any of the available methods > respectively fetching fresh online coins, using money-changers to do > the same more off-line, and self re-spending to add confusion. Hence > transferable off-line coins are already superior to both > non-transferable off-line coins and online coins due to the selection > of choice of new features and trade-offs offered to the users. All we > need now is a way to more robustly defeat linkability.
While I agree with goal, it's not clear to me that it's physically possible. What makes "money" useful is it's physical existance, people have been counterfiting coins since they were invented but it's been getting harder to do. With off-line coins you could easily counterfit or double spend and live off the float, especially if you do it all anonymously. And if you just do it once with some huge sum, you'd get away with it (like Enron guys did :-) Money boils down to psycology - people trust that it trades their effort for somebody elses effort. who's going to trust ephemeral bits? Crossing that barrier is going to be a lot harder than any technology. Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
