Bob sez:
At 9:25 PM 8/22/94 -0700, Timothy C. May wrote:
Anonymity is what gives digital cash it's raison d'etre, it's technological advantages over conventional schemes.
Well I don't buy the idea that people will shell out cash for this (i.e. I think the only way we'll wind up with annonymous digicash is if the people who put together the best system insist on anonymity) but I can't claim to have data to refute this.
I'll try to to come at this from another tack. Cryptography gives anonymity. Anononymity reduces the overhead. The reduced overhead should make digital cash more economically efficient than on-line systems like NetBank, or credit-cards or much of anything else, at the moment. The economic efficiency is what may make digitial cash economical as a way to provide liquidity for internet commerce. The major selling point is *not* privacy. The major selling point is economic efficiency.
Well we agree that the selling point is economic efficiency. But "anonymity reduces overhead" ? All that you save is the space required for the recording of names. Since whichever digicash system wins will almost certainly include software automating double entry accounting, I have real trouble buying this. How much overhead do you really save? Is it enough to offset the costs of implementing the double spender identification system? I don't think it is. [Although it seems to me that the costs of both are absolutely trivial and not worth considering when speaking of the overhead in a digicash system. Far more important are the investment of capital and the pragmatics of the exchange mechanism]
If anonymity, untraceability, and other "Chaumian" notions are only seen as peripheral side effects, then we already _have_ "digital cash" in the encrypted credit card systems some folks are already offering.
They are peripheral side effects. They also are the very things that make digital cash a more efficient medium of exchange.
How? There are alot of reasons why I think anonymity is important, but I fail to see any significant economic advantage that anonymity confers to a person who otherwise couldn't care less about it. Jason W. Solinsky