Well, I guess once you need a 3rd party for the e$, it's only going to make sense that the issuer offer a "value added" service like you're talking about. A 3rd party verifier is probably going to be too costly. But I'm not 100% convinced that you HAVE TO have a 3rd party verifier, but it's looking like that's what's going to make sense 99% of the time anyway. -TD

From: hal@finney.org ("Hal Finney") To: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: Your source code, for sale Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 10:51:24 -0800 (PST)

Ben Laurie writes:

...

How do you make the payment already "gone" without using a third party?

Of course there has to be a third party in the form of the currency issuer. If it is someone like e-gold, they could do as I suggested and add a feature where the buyer could transfer funds irrevocably into an escrow account which would be jointly controlled by the buyer and the seller. This way the payment is already "gone" from the POV of the buyer and if the seller completes the transaction, the buyer has less incentive to cheat him.

In the case of an ecash mint, a simple method would be for the seller to give the buyer a proto-coin, that is, the value to be signed at the mint, but in blinded form. The buyer could take this to the mint and pay to get it signed. The resulting value is no good to the buyer because he doesn't know the blinding factors, so from his POV the money (he paid to get it signed) is already "gone". He can prove to the seller that he did it by using the Guillou-Quisquater protocol to prove in ZK that he knows the mint's signature on the value the seller gave him.

The seller thereby knows that the buyer's costs are sunk, and so the seller is motivated to complete the transaction. The buyer has nothing to lose and might as well pay the seller by giving him the signed value from the mint, which the seller can unblind and (provably, verifiably) be able to deposit.

Hal

_________________________________________________________________ Dont just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/