Can anyone briefly discuss the anonymity features (or lack thereof) for Mondex?
Any anonymity derives from the fact that Mondex cards are bearer devices. Sure, a real name may have to be used to obtain a card, but I don't see how Mondex can prevent the cards being passed on. One would guess that they could only realistically achieve this if the card were embedded in a credit card or something similar. As far as I can see, the transactions have to be untraceable, as long as user to user transactions can occur, and there is no limit to the number of transactions per card. Even if the cards record the last 300 (as rumours suggest) transactions, that just means I have to perform 300 transactions between a pair of my cards in order to erase the "interesting" history. The ability to erase the history could only be prevented by restricting the number of transactions per card, or by preventing card to card transactions. There does seem to be some scope for other tracing tricks however. For instance, it may be possible for a card to remember IDs of the last few hundred cards it has communicated with. However, if we know this, then we just have to have a few hundred cards of our own to "erase" the interesting IDs. Bear in mind that it may be possible for all "electronic coins" that are issued to be given a serial number. There would be no tricks to circumvent this, but of course tracing can only occur when the money leaves and enters the bank (and perhaps at every shop counter), so the usefulness of this is limited if many user to user transactions are occurring. I don't think Mondex does this, though, since the memory requirements seem to be too large for todays smartcards. What I *guess* Mondex does do though, is "mark" coins in certain situations - eg. a kidnapper is paid a ransom via cellphone in another country using Mondex, but the coins are marked. They will stay marked no matter how many times they are transferred, and eventually will be caught by the system (either as they are deposited into an account, or perhaps via shop terminals looking for the mark). This would not ensure the catching of the kidnapper, but at least gives the authorities a start. It may also be possible to put a time limit on these expired coins, so that the money "vanishes" some time after the baby is returned alive (or whatever). Gary