The paper does, however, repeat the "infinity liability" fallacy. (See: http://www.c2.net/~cman/) At 02:38 PM 11/3/96 -0800, you wrote:
I just finished reading the report "How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash" by Law, Sabett & Solinas. It can be found at <http://jya.com/nsamint.htm>.
It is very well written with only identification of the issues except in the last short paragraph where they clearly lean toward government interests.
They identify and distinguish interests of the bank, the consumer's privacy, and the government. Some of the measures that they describe (providing for traceability) might well be done by a bank operating in an anarchy. Imagine that you are running a bank in an anarchy and the son of one of your good customers is kidnapped and held for ransom. Suppose that the kidnapper is a good customer of another bank with whom you have an arm's length relation. The arguments are not simple. Only towards the end does the paper begin to conflate the interests of the government and the bank. Some of the law enforcement purposes that they describe would apply to the anarchy bank, others would not.
The paper is the best description I have seen of several advanced money schemes. It has a better description of Chaum's off-line scheme than I had seen before. It describes sever even more advanced schemes, both abstracted form the mathematical details, and then with the details filled in.