e$ seigniorage (and is this the cost of untracability?)

JonWienke at aol.com JonWienke at aol.com
Sun Apr 7 03:10:11 PDT 1996


Wei Dai writes:

>One possible way to get around this is to have ecash issuers pay interest
>on ecash.  However it requires ecash to be timestamped and therefore
>compromises its untraceability.  (Think of the timestamp as a serial
>number.)

Interest-bearing accounts cannot legally be anonymous--the IRS requires
records of interest payments for tax purposes.  Even if the e$ issuer is
collecting interest on my ecash, I don't care as long as they don't charge me
any fees,.  As far as I am concerned, if the issuer can make anonymous e$
worth his while to issue, the loss in potential interest income is more than
outweighed by the advantages of being able to use such a system.

Jonathan Wienke






More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list