At 10:08 PM 8/23/94 -0400, Jason W Solinsky wrote:
Well we agree that the selling point is economic efficiency. But "anonymity reduces overhead" ?
I keep getting tangled up in that. I'll try again. Anonymity is not the issue. Strong Cryptography is the issue. Anonymity comes from strong crypto. Like I said before, anonymity is the byproduct of using strong crypto to build a digital cash system.
No it isn't. Making a digital cash system secure, scalable and distributed is a non-trivial task, making it anonymous is still more difficult. Guaranteeing anonymity creates alot of problems as was brought out in a previous discussion on license based cash in which it was pointed out that by colluding with consumers a bank can still "mark" bills.
It turns out that in creating an anonymous digital cash system, you can do very cheap, irrefutable transactions offline in an internetworked environment. That's cheaper for a whole lot of reasons, a relatively minor one being the ability to pool the cash without a lot of transaction recordkeeping. You don't have to know who gave you each piece of money in order to find who stiffed you, if it happens.
I am yet to see a single anonymous digital cash system which could not be implemented more simply if the requirement on anonymity were not made. I would be pleased to be proven wrong.
The reduced overhead increases economic efficiency.
What I'm really asking is for an example of this overhead that is being reduced.
There are other reasons for not doing on-line transactions. Including credit checks, interest calculations on outstanding balances, vendor reserve requirements, transaction threading, on-line wait states and bandwidth, etc. It's considerable.
And its going to get more considerable when we have communities of agents arguing with each other. I think we want to solve the problems created by these requirements, not shy away from them. JWS