Daniel A. Nagy wrote:
Those two ideas are not new, and I know that. What is new is the publication of a signed transaction log by the issuer; the splitting of public and private information in such a way that allows for transparent issuer governance without invading privacy.
In the electronic cash literature, governance issues have rarely been raised, let alone properly addressed. Systematic treatment of transparent governance in digital payments begun, AFAIK, with the research of Ian Grigg.
Hey, thanks for the credit! You raise an interesting claim. I think it is fair to say that a lot of people have looked at governance of digital cash but almost all of their efforts have proceeded from a technical crypto pov, and have thus not got very far. If you wade thru the early FC proceedings you'll see a steady stream of papers trying to make blinded tokens slightly less blind with various mixed objectives that could be interpreted as governance (often presented as control for various other purposes). My approach has not been technical but has been what we could call 'institutional' - looking at how the people and organisations could protect it, which has the advantage of being familiar to those who would be charged with the job anyway. From memory the others who've looked at the subject from an institutional perspective would be people like Mark Miller, Nick Szabo and the late Gary Howland, but they were more focused on overall ramifications than specific governance issues.
For a (long) while, both Ian and I were convinced that transparent governance and blind signatures don't mix well. It was cyphrpunk in this discussion, who pointed out the essential similarity between the proto-coin in chaumian schemes and the cryptographic challenge in my paper. It came up in the context of invoicing, but -- as we recently realized -- it can also be used for governance, when coupled with these two old ideas.
In short, the basic idea is for the issuer to _publish_ in an undeniable manner the responses (with some additional info) to exchange requests instead of sending the information back to the requesting party using a private channel. I do think (in agreement with several reviewers of my work) that the setup proposed in the discussed paper, where the communication between the users and the issuer is such that the issuer's responses to users' requests are broadcast and archived in public records is novel.
If this is the case, it would be an exciting development! I guess we have to wait for the paper to see ... it isn't obvious to me how the above would work. iang PS: In your other email:
A new paper, tentatively titled "Digital Cash: Notes and Coins" is being written. If there's going to be an FC++ issue in December or January, we might have a go at it before publishing the paper using a more traditional channel.
I have 1.5 papers for an FC++ issue, this would probably tip the balance.