[fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: On Digital Cash-like Payment Systems

[Ian G]

Daniel A. Nagy wrote:
> Those two ideas are not new, and I know that. What is new is the publication
> of a signed transaction log by the issuer; the splitting of public and
> private information in such a way that allows for transparent issuer governance
> without invading privacy.
> 
> In the electronic cash literature, governance issues have rarely been
> raised, let alone properly addressed. Systematic treatment of transparent
> governance in digital payments begun, AFAIK, with the research of Ian Grigg.

Hey, thanks for the credit!  You raise an interesting
claim.  I think it is fair to say that a lot of people
have looked at governance of digital cash but almost
all of their efforts have proceeded from a technical
crypto pov, and have thus not got very far.  If you wade
thru the early FC proceedings you'll see a steady stream of
papers trying to make blinded tokens slightly less blind
with various mixed objectives that could be interpreted
as governance (often presented as control for various
other purposes).

My approach has not been technical but has been what we
could call 'institutional' - looking at how the people and
organisations could protect it, which has the advantage
of being familiar to those who would be charged with the
job anyway.  From memory the others who've looked at
the subject from an institutional perspective would be
people like Mark Miller, Nick Szabo and the late Gary
Howland, but they were more focused on overall ramifications
than specific governance issues.

> For a (long) while, both Ian and I were convinced that transparent
> governance and blind signatures don't mix well. It was cyphrpunk in this
> discussion, who pointed out the essential similarity between the proto-coin
> in chaumian schemes and the cryptographic challenge in my paper. It came up
> in the context of invoicing, but -- as we recently realized -- it can also
> be used for governance, when coupled with these two old ideas.
> 
> In short, the basic idea is for the issuer to _publish_ in an undeniable
> manner the responses (with some additional info) to exchange requests
> instead of sending the information back to the requesting party using a private
> channel. I do think (in agreement with several reviewers of my work) that
> the setup proposed in the discussed paper, where the communication between
> the users and the issuer is such that the issuer's responses to users'
> requests are broadcast and archived in public records is novel.

If this is the case, it would be an exciting development!
I guess we have to wait for the paper to see ... it isn't
obvious to me how the above would work.

iang

PS: In your other email:
 > A new paper,
 > tentatively titled "Digital Cash: Notes and Coins" is being written. If
 > there's going to be an FC++ issue in December or January, we might have a go
 > at it before publishing the paper using a more traditional channel.

I have 1.5 papers for an FC++ issue, this would
probably tip the balance.