A Funeral Dirge for Ecash

[Declan McCullagh]

Okay, I am starting to think that my description was not entirely
perfect. It was reworked on the phone late last night by a copy editor
who didn't understand the original wording (but I'm not trying to
assign blame, since she read me her edited version back on the phone
and I probably should have objected).

I'll spend more time on this section in my next piece.

On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 12:30:34PM -0700, Eric Cordian wrote:
> 
> If I follow Declan's argument, should I wish the bank to sign a note for
> $1, I send the bank 100 such notes each encrypted with a different key.
> 
> The bank then requests the decryption key for 99 of them, and after
> verifying that they are in fact $1 notes, has only a 1/100 chance that
> I've slipped a $1,000,000 note into the pile and they've missed it.
> 
> So in the DeclanCash system, every 100th dishonest transaction can rip the
> bank off for $999,999, an average loss for the bank of approximately $10k
> per dishonest transaction attempted

Or the bank could require 999,999 transactions and prosecute for fraud
if they're getting hoodwinked.  Or, as you say, limit the
denomination.

-Declan