Waiting for a transaction to be confirmed can be an impediment towards POS transactions. Accepting a check from a trusted Bitcoin bank would be one solution to the problem. I've being thinking about how this would work and have derived the following protocol so far:
Alice wishes to buy a neat toy for her daughter from Bob for two Bitcoins.
Alice asks Bob if she can pay with a check from her bank, ABC. Bob says 'yes' and gives her the public key to make the check out to (call it PK).
Alice contacts ABC and asks for a check payable to PK for the amount of two Bitcoins. ABC checks Alice's account for two Bitcoins. Alice's account has at least two Bitcoins, so ABC puts a hold on her account for, say five minutes, of the amount two Bitcoins. ABC then creates a check of the following form and gives it to Alice:
(magic bytes) [identifies this as being a check]
ABC [the name of her bank]
2 [the amount of the check]
PK [the receiver's public key]
(transaction details) [public information about the transaction]
(bank info) [encrypted information used by ABC. Can contain information such as an id number to prevent double spending, Alice's account number, etc.]
(bank signature) [A signature by ABC of all previous fields]
Alice gives this check to Bob.
Scenario 1 (Bob doesn't have a bank):
Bob verifies he can accept the check. Bob contacts ABC and asks to cash a check. Bob gives the check to ABC. ABC verifies the check, and gives a nonce to Bob. Bob encrypts the nonce with the corresponding private key of PK and gives the result back to ABC. ABC verifies the result with PK, and asks Bob for a receiving address. Bob gives a receiving address to ABC. ABC sends two Bitcoins to the address and notifies Bob that Bitcoins have been sent.
Scenario 2 (Bob's bank is XYZ):
Bob contacts XYZ and asks to deposit a check. Bob gives the check to XYZ. PK is the public key for XYZ, so they perform the steps in Scenario 1. Upon success, XYZ informs Bob that his account has been credited the amount on the check.
The transaction is now complete, so Bob gives the neat toy to Alice.
(transaction details) can be used to indicate the type of account from which the amount is being drawn. In the above situation, this field is empty, indicating full-reserve on-demand Bitcoin deposits.
Thoughts? Does anyone see something wrong with the above?
