-- Major Variola:
Internal resistance mediated by cypherpunkly tech can always be defeated by cranking up the police state a notch.
This is eg why e-cash systems have anonymity problems.
James A. Donald:
The problem is that any genuinely irrevocable payment system gets swarmed by conmen and fraudsters. We have a long way to go before police states are the problem.
Steve Furlong
Heh. When the stasi come a-callin' tell them they'll have to wait because you've got bigger problems. Wonder how well that would work?
The stasi are not a callin yet on ecash, and have not been particularly effective against people publishing bittorrents.
I see that an irrevocable payment system, used by itself, is ripe for fraud, more so if it's anonymous. But why wouldn't a mature system make use of trusted intermediaries?
People issuing e-cash systems want to be irrevocable and anonymous, in part because the market niche for revocable payments is occupied by paypal and credit card companies, but they are running into trouble from fraudsters. They also have trouble from states, but as yet the trouble from states is merely the usual mindless bureaucratic regulatory harassment that disrupts all businesses, not any specific hostility to difficult-to-trace extranational payments.
The vendors register with the intermedi- ary *, who takes some pains to verify their identity, trustworthiness, and so on, and to keep the vendors' identities a secret, if appropriate. The sellers pay the intermediary, who takes a piece of the action to act basically as an insurer of the vendor's good faith. If there's a problem with the service or merchandise and the vendor won't make good, the intermediary is responsible for making the buyer whole. Is there some reason this wouldn't work? If not, why hasn't anyone tried it yet? Not enough cash flow to make it worth their while?
Lots of people have tried it, with varying degrees of success. Not much demand for it yet. A big problem is that whenever any such a website achieves some degree of acceptance, a storm of fake websites appear imitating its name, its look and feel, with urls that looks very similar. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Y34+Yhj/+imvS+mJMNI1gisrEu1m1KVnVZ1XWcQC 4IiGQ9ui1sYZ89OBlTxmM6HA8I+qJa2Q8CwcRJu3c