CRYPTO: Money laundering and traceability

Chaum's arguments appear to apply to virtually any electronic cash system which can prevent double-spending. They suggest that traceable cash will be the rule in any digicash system.

That's true for transferable and off-line cash systems. The same argument doesn't hold for on-line systems. There you can have an exchange protocol to deposit a piece of digicash and immediately rewithdraw it, blinding it again in the process. There need be no account with the bank for this to happen. Eric