Interesting articles for XMR peeps:
1.
http://www.wired.com/1994/12/emoney/2.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm3.
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/31/us/computer-jokes-and-threats-ignite-debate-on-anonymity.html?pagewanted=all4.
http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/cfp97.htm5.
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~kmay/look/digital/Laundry.htm6.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/0908/6005172a.html -
"There is another dimension to the spread of crypto. The same mathematical tricks used to encode a message can be run in reverse, to generate a so-called digital signature. This is a computer stamp of authenticity. It can be used to prove that an electronic document originated with a particular sender, such as a bank depositor or a bank officer. Assemble a few digital signatures in a clever fashion and you have created a mechanism for digital cash;a system of electronic payments akin to Visa or MasterCard but with the added feature that it can be made anonymous." - FORBES 1997 "
Hidden Values in ANON currency Does anonymity really matter when it comes to electronic money? Some people dismiss its significance – or argue that anonymity is a bad thing.
"Speaking for myself, it would be dangerous and unsound public policy to allow fully untraceable, unlimited value digital currency to be produced," says Kawika Daguio of the American Bankers Association. "It opens up opportunities for abuse that aren't available to criminals now. In the physical world, money is bulky. In the physical world, it is possible to follow people, so a kidnapper can potentially be caught if the currency is marked, if the money was being observed on location, or if the serial numbers were recorded. Fully anonymous cash might allow opportunities for counterfeiting and fraud."
Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft concurs. "There's a role for untraceable transactions. But it's not a panacea. Some people get very worked up about it. But there's been a very steady trend away from untraceable cash. There are cases where explicit traceability is a good thing. Like in my business expenses. I want them to trace it! All these things are there for a reason. They're not there as part of a plan by nefarious Big Brother. Look, I understand Chaum's concern to a certain degree. There's a lot of concern for privacy today. But I do worry about the idea of saving people from themselves. Just because I sign up for a traceable form of money doesn't mean I want my next-door neighbor to see my transactions."
Chaum says he has never argued for total untraceability, but sort of a constrained anonymity. "My work has been trying to establish a whole space of possibilities, bounded by pure perfect anonymity on one side and a perfect identification on the other side."
Chaum is not the only person working this turf: building on his ideas, researchers at Sandia Labs have been working on a scheme that attempts to balance anonymity with law enforcement's need to trace criminal transactions. Sort of an anonymous, digital-cash Clipper Chip. "I was concerned about some of the effects electronic cash could have on criminal activity," says Ernie Brickell, a Sandia cryptographer. "It could make it very easy for people to undertake kidnappings and extortion. It might be possible for a person to do a kidnapping and ask for money to be exchanged in a way in which there was no physical exchange – you would have no idea what country the person was in. There was also the potential that new types of criminal activity would emerge. So we looked at whether it would be possible to develop electronic cash schemes in which people could have much of the privacy that Chaum talks about, but with hooks in it, so that if law enforcement had the need to look into a transaction, it could."
Yet it is not at all clear that even this sort of limited anonymity will gain, er, currency. Users of electronic cash – the general public – will probably never be polled on whether they prefer it to be anonymous. Brickell admits that anonymity will be a hard sell. "There's going to be so much information about individuals floating around, that we want to protect privacy as much as we can," he says. "But some of the bankers feel that an anonymous system is never going to make it, or even be something that they can get behind." In fact, says Niels Ferguson, a cryptographer who works for DigiCash, "the people who decide actually often have an interest in not protecting people's privacy because they are among the potential benefactors of gathering the information."
But what of the Nathan Myhvolds, who seem to argue that they want traceability? Ferguson sighs. "Oh, the number of times I've had to argue with people that they need privacy! They'll say, 'I don't care if you know where I spend my money.' I usually tell them, 'What if I hire a private investigator to follow you around all day? Would you get mad?' And the answer always is, 'Yes, of course I would get mad.' And then my argument is, 'If we have no privacy in our transaction systems, I can see every payment – every cup of coffee you drink, every Mars bar you get, every glass of Coke you drink, every door you open, every telephone call – you make. If I can see those, I don't need a private investigator. I can just sit behind my terminal and follow you around all day.' And then people start to realize that, yes, privacy is in fact something important. Any one part of the information is probably unimportant. But the collection of the information, that is important."
Which is exactly why certain officials are licking their chops at the prospect of traceable cash. These include, of course, law-enforcement agencies, who are more than eager to see hard cash phased out. What would the drug dealers do? The money launderers? The underground economy? They will argue that granting anonymity to digital cash would provide a bonanza for kidnappers, muggers … criminals of every stripe. But consider a world where all money is electronic and traceable, and you have the most potent crime-fighting weapon in history.
The institution with the most to gain is the Internal Revenue Service. The computer age has been very good to the IRS, which now has access to any number of databases that yield reality checks on any given citizen's tax returns. Traceable cash would accelerate this process, and the tax-collection agency can't wait to take advantage of it. In a recent speech – presented on April 15, no less! – Coleta Brueck, the project manager for the IRS's Document Processing System, described some of the IRS's plans. These include the so-called "Golden Eagle" return, in which the government automatically gathers all relevant aspects of a person's finances, sorts them into appropriate categories and then tallies the tax due. "One-stop service," as Brueck puts it. This information would be fed to other government agencies, as well as states and municipalities, which would draw upon it for their own purposes. She vows "absolutely" that this will happen, assuming that Americans will be grateful to be relieved of the burden of filing any taxes. The government will simply take its due.
"If I know what you've made during the year, if I know what your withholding is, if I know what your spending pattern is, I should be able to generate for you a tax return," she says. "I am an excellent advocate of return-free filing. We know everything about you that we need to know. Your employer tells us everything about you that we need to know. Your activity records on your credit cards tell us everything about you that we need to know. Through interface with Social Security, with the DMV, with your banking institutions, we really have a lot of information, so why … at the end of the year or on April 15, do we ask the Post Office to encumber itself with massive numbers of people out there, with picking up pieces of paper that you are required to file? … I don't know why. We could literally file a return for you. This is the future we'd like to go to."
It isn't the future that David Chaum would like to go to, though, and in hopes of preventing that degree of openness in an individual's affairs, he continues doggedly in his crusade for privacy."
