At 11:24 PM 12/3/00 -0800, Ray Dillinger wrote:
On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Adam Back wrote:
The protocols you list are online. Not that this is a bad thing -- I kind of prefer the online idea -- rather than the "and then you go to jail" implications of fraud tracing in the offline protocols. Plus you have a risk of accidentally double spending if your computer crashes or something.
I think that would depend on the banker. "Bob spent this hundred dollars three times," muses Alice. "Check and see if he's got overdraft protection for the extra two hundred... if he doesn't, then put it on his credit card with a fifteen dollar loan orignation fee and charge him two percent a month...." Jail time, in most cases, probably just isn't profitable for the bankers. After all,
The issue isn't whether jail or just extra charges are the appropriate remedy for double-spending - it's that the offline methods generally rely on encoding a user's name in the coins so you can tell who did the double spending, which not only adds a lot of administrative overhead but requires that you have a system of identification of your users. Some online methods also do the "identify and punish" approach; others do the far simpler "first one to grab the money wins" approach to double-spending, which is better for anonymity, though it imposes different risks on the users. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639