Re: Forgery, bills, and the Four Horsemen (Articles and Comment)
At 22:42 9/5/95, Bryce Wilcox wrote:
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I, Bryce Wilcox <bryce.wilcox@colorado.edu> wrote:
I hope I'm not missing anything here.
shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green) wrote:
Only that Ecash has no benefits for transactions that are of an illegal nature. The meaning of "illegal" is of course increasing as new laws are passed every session of the legislature.
Chaum says that (especially when speaking before U.S. Congress) but I think he is playing both sides of the fence. He is a die-hard privacy advocate who allegedly turns down lucrative business deals because he feels they would dilute his privacy achievements. The truth is that Chaumian DigiCash is a *lot* safer for criminals than, say, credit cards, and when it is combined with the other tools in a money launderer's toolbox, I expect it will be a great boon to them.
Chaum is a privacy advocate when it comes to companies compiling dosiers on you. When it comes to criminal use, my conversations with Chaum, his public comments, and last not least the current implementation of his software suggest otherwise.
Suppose you have acquired a million dollars worth of legal, above-board DigiCash dollars and you want to surreptitiously transfer this wealth to a below-board friend. Your friend creates a temporary anonymous account at an understanding bank. Y
Won't work. Ecash, except as used for frequent flyer like points, will exist in only *one* world wide e$ currency, issued by a single entity composed of various major banks and subject to US laws. Getting Ecash accounts will therefore be subject to the same legal requirenments that apply to normal US checking accounts.
Now without active physical surveillance, nobody other than yourself and your friend will ever know where the money went, and you can't prove that you gave it to him, either...
You or a sting operation can always reveal the recipient by publishing the blinding factor. Besides, your Ecash client keeps a log of the payees. -- Lucky Green <mailto:shamrock@netcom.com> PGP encrypted mail preferred.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- I, Bryce Wilcox <bryce.wilcox@colorado.edu> wrote:
Suppose you have acquired a million dollars worth of legal, above-board DigiCash dollars and you want to surreptitiously transfer this wealth to a below-board friend. Your friend creates a temporary anonymous account at an understanding bank.
shamrock@netcom.com (Lucky Green) wrote:
Won't work. Ecash, except as used for frequent flyer like points, will exist in only *one* world wide e$ currency, issued by a single entity composed of various major banks and subject to US laws. Getting Ecash accounts will therefore be subject to the same legal requirenments that apply to normal US checking accounts.
1. Sez who? 2. We are discussing the feasibility of using DigiCash currency for illegal money laundering. We have to assume (ceteris paribus) that the would-be launderers are still capable of the same tricks that they are currently capable of, which, apparently, includes access to anonymous bank accounts.
Now without active physical surveillance, nobody other than yourself and your friend will ever know where the money went, and you can't prove that you gave it to him, either...
You or a sting operation can always reveal the recipient by publishing the blinding factor.
If you do it via his one-time bank account then you can only reveal to which one-time anonymous account you transferred the money-- no more. Even if you and your beneficiary don't have this option, the transaction is still much safer and more convenient if done via DigiCash than via any other current currency. Criminals and conspirators live with the everpresent problem of betrayal, and this "one step, one way, requires the cooperation of the payer" traceability seems to me to be a small hassle on the way to a big win for such people.
Besides, your Ecash client keeps a log of the payees.
Crytographically (and in the limit, legally) meaningless, right? I could edit my log right now to say I gave you a thousand cyberbucks in return for an illegal copy of some information, but no-one would care. I appreciate your correspondance. Bryce signatures follow: + public key on keyservers /. island Life in a chaos sea or via finger 0x617c6db9 / bryce.wilcox@colorado.edu ---* -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 Comment: Auto-signed with Bryce's Auto-PGP v1.0beta3 iQCVAwUBME3CFvWZSllhfG25AQFi3gQAmyJoB3RJKx3lNb1fCLPluulVbi6kh3+I ++fGXC8vTGOEfaNnkjOxvcZ5VCXRJNlwQB9D2hKICSJCxpoQWKSDjgEWy48HH8AV P0LSBfQ/LX9O91X7/dkyBCDoULhPx2HYTSbOgumS10+X/IsldUfcY36q0tTQy3u7 7ES5HIG2wv8= =idOQ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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