SIX ECASH Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World by David D. Friedman - unasempliceantispam oltreilporno fiduciacommissioniprivacy nientecasseforti signoraggioepubblicità firmareedoublespending ecashnelmondoreale c/cvirtuali benedireteeostilitàgoverni
One is that a seller does not have to know anything about me in order to accept cash. That makes money a better medium for transactions with strangers,Read more at location 956
better medium for small transactions, since using cash avoids the fixed costsRead more at location 957
money leaves no paper trail, which is useful not only for criminals but for anyone who wants to protect his privacyRead more at location 958
The advantage of money is greater in cyberspace, since transactions with strangers,Read more at location 960
The disadvantage is less, since my ecash would be stored inside my computer,Read more at location 961
Despite its potential usefulness, there is as yet no equivalent of cash available online,Read more at location 962
The reason is in part the hostility of governments to competition in the money business,Read more at location 963
giving at least one example of why it would be useful - for something more important than allowing men to look at pornography online without their wives or employers finding out. Read more at location 965
There is a simple solution to this problem - so simple that I am surprised it is not yet in common use. The solution is to put a price on your mailbox.Read more at location 969
Give your email program a list of the people you wish to receive mail from. Mail from anyone not on the list is returned with a note explaining that you charge five cents to read mail from strangers - and the URL of the stamp machine. Five cents is a trivial cost to anyone with something to sayRead more at location 970
The stamp machine is located on a web page. The stamps are digital cash. Pay $10 from your credit card and you get in exchange 200 five-cent stamps - each a morsel of encrypted information that you can transfer to someone else who can in turn transfer it. Read more at location 973
If lots of strangers choose to send me messages, I can accumulate a surplusRead more at location 976
What is in it for the stamp machine - why would someone maintain such a system? Part of the answer is seigniorageRead more at location 980
If your stamps are popular, many of them may stay in circulation for a long time - leaving the money that bought them in your bank account accumulating interest. Read more at location 981
If you own the stamp machine, you also own the wall behind it - the web page people visit to buy stamps. Advertisements on that wall will be seen by a lot of people. Read more at location 983
One reason this solution to spam requires ecash is that it involves a large number of very small payments.Read more at location 984
A second reason is privacy. Many of us would prefer not to leave a complete record of our correspondenceRead more at location 986
how to provide people with virtual banknotes that cannot be counterfeited. Read more at location 988
When he receives the file he checks the digital signature against the bank's public key. Read more at location 992
Sending a copy of the file in payment for one transaction does not erase it from your computer,Read more at location 993
One solution is for the bank to give each dollar its own identification number and keep track of which ones have been spent.Read more at location 995
This solves the problem of double spending, but it also eliminates most of the advantages of ecash over credit cards. The bank knows that it issued banknote 94602... to Alice,Read more at location 998
The solution to this problem uses what David Chaum, the Dutch cryptographer who is responsible for many of the ideas underlying ecash, calls blind signatures.Read more at location 1000
Curious readers will want to know how it is possible for a bank to sign a serial number without knowing what it is. I cannot tell them without first explaining the mathematics of public key encryption,Read more at location 1007
But digital cash could also be useful for realspace transactions, and the cabby or hotdog vendor may not yet have an Internet connection.Read more at location 1011
You tell your computer what to pay to whom; it tells you what other people have paid to you and how much money you have.Read more at location 1042
Random numbers, checks of digital signatures, blind signing, and all the rest are done in the background.Read more at location 1043
how little most of us know about how the tools we routinely use, such as cars, computers, or radios, actually work. Read more at location 1044
What motivated him was the problem we discussed back in Chapter 4 - the loss of privacy created by the ability of modern information processing to combine publicly available information into a detailed portrait of each individual. Read more at location 1045
It would be very convenient if, instead of stopping at a toll booth when getting on or off the interstate, we could simply drive past, making the payment automaticallyRead more at location 1047
One problem is privacy. If the payment is made with a credit card, or if the toll agency adds up each month's tolls and sends you a bill, someone has a complete record of every trip you have taken on the toll road, every time you have crossed a toll bridge.Read more at location 1049
Ecash solves that problem. As you whiz past the tollbooth, your car pays it fifty cents in anonymous ecash. By the time you are thirty feet down the road, the (online) tollbooth has checked that the money is good; if it isn't an alarm goes off, a camera triggers, and if you do not stop a traffic cop eventually appears on your tail.Read more at location 1052
It works for shopping as well. Ecash - this time encoded in a smart card in your wallet,Read more at location 1055
My examples so far assume that ecash will be produced and redeemed by private banks but denominated in government money.Read more at location 1058
any ecash expected to circulate widely will be issued by organizations with reputations.Read more at location 1065
Some economists, in rejecting the idea of private money, have argued that such an institution is inherently inflationary.Read more at location 1067
The rebuttal to this particular argument was published in 1776. When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, the money of Scotland consisted largely of banknotes issued by private banks, redeemable in silver.' As Smith pointed out, while a bank could print as many notes as it wished, it could not persuade other people to hold an unlimited number of its notes.Read more at location 1069
Dollars have one great advantage - they provide a common unit already in widespread use. They also have one great disadvantage - they are produced by a government, and it may not always be in the interest of that government to maintain their value in a stable,Read more at location 1079
Dollars have a second disadvantage, although perhaps a less serious one. Because they are issued by a particular government, citizens of other governments may prefer not to use them.Read more at location 1084
If large amounts of gold are discovered or if someone invents new and better techniques for extracting gold from low-grade ore, the value of gold, and of gold-based money, will decline.2Read more at location 1088
That problem is solved by replacing a simple commodity standard with a commodity bundle.Read more at location 1091
getting all the firms issuing ecash to agree on the same bundle. If they fail to establish a common standard, we end up with a cyberspace in which different people use different currencies and the exchange rates between them vary randomly. That is not an unworkable situation - Europeans lived with it for a very long time - but it is a nuisance. Life is easier if the money I use is the same as the money used by the people I do business with.Read more at location 1097
A system of multiple monopoly government moneys works less well in cyberspace because in cyberspace national borders are transparent.Read more at location 1103
The obvious solution is to establish a single standard of value, either by adopting one national currency, probably the dollar, possibly the euro, or by establishing a private standard such as the sort of commodity bundle described earlier. Read more at location 1106
The reason that everyone wants to use the same currency as his neighbors is that currency conversion is a nuisance. But currency conversion is arithmetic and computers do arithmetic fast and cheap. Perhaps, with some minor improvements in the interfaces on which we do online business, we could make the choice of currency irrelevant, permitting multiple standards to coexist. Read more at location 1107
As I write, the countries of Europe are in the final stages of replacing their multiple national currencies with the euro. If the picture I have just painted turns out to be correct, they may have finally achieved a common currency just as it was becoming unnecessary. Read more at location 1117
he was generally right about the way the world was moving, wrong about how fast it would get there. He correctly saw the logical pattern but failed to allow for the enormous inertia of human society. Read more at location 1123
Chaum himself, working with the Mark Twain Bank of Saint Louis, attempted to get a semi-anonymous ecash into circulation - one that permitted one party to a transaction to be identified by joint action of the other party and the bank. The effort failed and was abandoned. One reason it has not happened is that online commerce has only very recently become large enough to justify it.Read more at location 1126
A second reason, I suspect but cannot prove, is that national governments are unhappy with the idea of a widely used money that they cannot controlRead more at location 1129
A third and closely related reason is that a truly anonymous ecash would eliminate a profitable form of law enforcement.Read more at location 1130
A final reason is that ecash is only useful to me if many other people are using it, which raises a problem in getting it started.Read more at location 1132
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