Digital Cash

[Jim Choate]

Have you looked at Plan 9? It would allow you to run the 'mint' as a
independent distributed service for all users that actually runs as no
user. It would require a 'virtual filespace' so the requisite binaries and
such don't reside on any one machine, not native but that's doable as
well. Once started, as long as there were any Plan 9 process/file spaces
available the service would 'live'.

On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Ray Dillinger wrote:
 
> I've been attempting to design a decentralized auction/
> exchange system that permits pseudonymous participants.  
> By 'decentralized', I mean that NO central server, or 
> subset of individual servers, controls access to any 
> resource the system cannot work without; that there 
> is no single point of failure. 
> 
> A consequence of this is that every ability that exists 
> in any node, must exist in every node.  So the whole 
> problem of currency issue gets the slightly weird 
> solution of "everybody has to be able to print their 
> own money."  
> 
> The sticking point is that this basically means the 
> system will be without any single universal "currency".
> A lot of E-cash techniques are usable, but what you wind 
> up trading is certificates that represent goods or 
> services offered by individuals in the system -- Alice 
> the Farmer might issue certificates for bushels of 
> wheat, while Bob the Carpenter might issue a bunch of 
> certificates that say "collect a thousand of these and 
> I'll redeem them for a new 10x10 meter deck on your house" 
> and Carol the moneychanger might promise to redeem hers 
> for one US dollar each, just for the amusement value of 
> "redeeming" something in a system where hard currencies 
> are the norm with a fiat currency. So these would be  
> effectively a sort of digital merchants scrip, reducing 
> back down to barter.
> 
> Exchange rates between the currencies issued by different 
> participants would fluctuate according to trust and 
> commodity values, and I'm okay with that.  Given the 
> nature of the trust/reputation thing, I'd expect only 
> a very small percentage of the participants to *actually* 
> issue their own currency, as they wouldn't get good 
> acceptance/exchange values until widely known, but 
> everybody would have the ability.
> 
> The problem I'm running into is that while all kinds of 
> e-cash protocols exist that protect the anonymity of 
> the buyer and a lot protect the anonymity of the seller, 
> there are none that protect the anonymity of the currency 
> issuer, which would be ideal in this circumstance.  With 
> the techniques I know of, the issuer can have only "Nym" 
> protection. 
> 
> The basic problem with anonymizing the issuers (beyond 
> technique alone) would be how the scrip gets redeemed 
> when you don't necessarily know whom the issuer is.
> 
> Can anybody recommend appropriate reading?
> 
> 
> 
> 			Bear
>