CHAUM as mental cripple

[professor rat]

'Chaum is also building into PrivaTegrity another feature that's sure to
be far more controversial: a carefully controlled backdoor > that allows
anyone doing something "generally recognized as evil" to have their
anonymity and privacy stripped altogether.'
[...]
Those of us who have been in the field for a while will (hazily) remember
that back in the 80's, Chaum invented the first
practical cryptocurrency. However, he patented his 'blind signature'
algorithms, which were the heart of the system, and he and
the DigiCash corporation (which was created to exploit the patents) were
extremely restrictive in their licensing. Reportedly,
this was because Chaum was concerned that Bad People might use it for money
laundering.The system saw very little
use. Much more detail can be found in the cypherpunks mailing list archives.

....which is a long way of saying that for Chaum to cripple his system with
a back door seems consistent with his earlier
reported behavior.

Peter Trei

https://marc.info/?l=cryptography&m=145223202406590&w=1