Controlled nymity

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Tue Aug 12 09:12:16 PDT 2003


    --
What we want of a payment system, is that Alice can prove she
paid Bob, even if Bob wants to deny it, but no one else can
prove that Alice paid Bob unless Alice takes special action to
make it provable.

(This provides permits recipient anonymity in that Bob can be
an alternate identity of Dave, and no one can prove that money
paid to Bob actually winds up with Dave.  They can, however
prove they paid Bob.)

If Alice pays Bob in unblinded tokens, this does not help, for
Bob can pass the unblinded tokens to yet another identity of
his, Fred.

One solution is for the bank to maintain an email linked
account for Bob, into which Alice pays.  This sounds ominous,
for the next step might be to link the account to true names,
can anyone see any other problems with it. 

    --digsig
         James A. Donald
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     a4EU+fvvOcH0Sv52K2EKbF8yLcgewuumffss+deq
     4NXChKCIzq02Njnl6SIFC224NDGKfgySzihcR3gfI





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