On Mon, Apr 08, 2002 at 07:52:32PM -0700, Mike Rosing wrote: > While I agree with goal, it's not clear to me that it's physically > possible. What makes "money" useful is it's physical existance, people > have been counterfiting coins since they were invented but it's been > getting harder to do. With off-line coins you could easily counterfit or
You can't outright counterfeit technically as the recipient of each coin checks that it's correctly formed, and authenticated by the bank, and that the chain of spends are all bound together. By doing this the user is assured that either the coin will not be double-spent, or the bank will identify the double spender when the coin is deposited. You might reasonably expect the bank to deal with double-spending itself and give the depositor fresh money regardless of double spent status. > double spend and live off the float, especially if you do it all > anonymously. If you use the normal approach of putting the identity in the coin, you can't double-spend anonymously. > And if you just do it once with some huge sum, you'd get > away with it (like Enron guys did :-) > > Money boils down to psycology - people trust that it trades their effort > for somebody elses effort. who's going to trust ephemeral bits? Crossing > that barrier is going to be a lot harder than any technology. Building up technology trust is harder yes. But that I guess is largely marketing and reputation. Most people probably don't understand the security mechanisms in place with credt-cards either (PIN offset on card etc.), or even more the more secure smart-card based credit cards used in some parts of the world. Adam
