At 09:12 AM 8/12/03 -0700, James A. Donald wrote:
-- What we want of a payment system, is that Alice can prove she paid Bob, even if Bob wants to deny it, but no one else can prove that Alice paid Bob unless Alice takes special action to make it provable.
One solution is for the bank to maintain an email linked account for Bob, into which Alice pays. This sounds ominous, for the next step might be to link the account to true names, can anyone see any other problems with it.
Does it help if: Alice generates a secret key for each payment Alice *anonymously* deposits an *encrypted* message containing payment details into Bob's acct Only Alice can reveal the key for a particular transaction in Bob's account, thereby stripping anonymity but also revealing payment. For only that transaction.