You do have somewhat of a point, but consider this. Real cash is anonymous. If you want to do electronic payments that are non-anonymous you can simply use a credit card or debit card (or something like paypal, egold), or for larger quanitities you can do wire transfers - so why would we need yet another a non-anonymous "cash" that isn't cash? Just because it's cool and we can call it electronic cash? What's the point? Why would you bother building it? Why would anyone bother using it? Confusing the authorities is a dumb thing to consider as a reason. They will smarten up pretty quickly if they think you're doing something illegal, and it won't make any difference what cool technical toys you have used. ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of /|\ \|/ :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\ <--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech. \/|\/ /|\ :Found to date: 0. Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD. \|/ + v + : The look on Sadam's face - priceless! --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------ On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Sampo Syreeni wrote:
On 2003-07-22, Sunder uttered:
If the digicash isn't anonymous, it's worthless.
I'd argue to the contrary. First, "most people have nothing to hide". The folks will want digicash for reasons other than anonymity, as argued by this particular "inventor" (I've wanted to handle my cash automatically eversince I got my first debit card). Second, once the cash is online, it's considerably easier to pool it, confuse the authorities about it, connect it to the existing anonymity infrastructure, build secondary services which allow its origin to be completely masked, and so on.