Bitcoins are great, first time I discovered it couple years ago I was really amazed.
However now I understand that it's distributed, secure, but not really anonymous. It's easy to recover half of all bitcoin owners doing some social analysis and I'm pretty sure if anyone really wants to, it's possible to find out owner of any address, which is participating in economy.
Yes, maybe if you don't use your coins you'll never be discovered, but what's the point to have them in a first place?
A lot of alternative coins exist, but they all share the same model, just playing with some parameters.
Having eternal transaction history log is quite a dangerous idea, more transactions it involves - more data can be observed about each user, like if you buy something in neighborhood grocery for bitcoins or coffee at your office coffeeshop - you can be easily traced.
I was thinking if it's possible to create totally different model.
Something more similar to cash.
Here's my idea:
- Each coin will be represented by some UUID, which is impossible to guess in short period of time.
- Instead of transaction history there is a log of all known coins and mining can confirm existing coins and create new using some proof of work mechanism similar to bitcoins
- Each coin has a public key and a private key. Owning a coin means having a private key. Nobody knows who has a private key from each particular coin
- New key-pair can be written to the coin only if you have current private key.
- Whenever you need to make a transaction, you collect private keys from enough amount of coins and transfer it to the buyer. He then uses those keys to rewrite coins and generate new keys for himself. You don't have access to the coins anymore
- No need to wait for confirmations, as nobody knows that you exchanged keys with someone. Everyone just know that this coin is legal, and will accept it as payment as soon as receive private keys from whoever claims to be an owner of that coin
- There is still need for confirmations, but only for new coins. After miner discovered it he can't use it right away, as nobody has this coin in logs yet. He should wait for network to confirm it
- We can set any reasonable generation rate by manipulating complexity of task miner needs to solve
- And one more thing, which is not actually related to model itself. I think coins generation should continue indefinitely, like 10% new coins per year. It's natural, because life is short and money should have more value for you today, than tomorrow. It allows reasonable loan activity.
The problem with bitcoins - there is limited amount. Longer you don't spend it, more it costs, which actually prevents people from participating in economy.
This is just a basics, we can dig dipper if anyone interested.
But I'd like to know what you think about it?
If someone knows the reason why it's bad idea, or cannot be done, please share with me.
