How to make a mint: The cryptography of anonymous electronic cash

by daeken • 17 years ago

27 34 17 years ago

daeken3• 17 years ago

Despite being an old article, I've seen few references to it in the wild, and thought it was very relevant after seeing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=777283

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

There was a dutch company called DigiCash that was quite far with developing such a concept.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash

daeken3• 17 years ago

There's also ECache: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECache

Very, very interesting stuff.

jonasvp2• 17 years ago

I've been thinking very hard about this topic lately and actually went ahead with writing some code. Then I found http://www.opencoin.org who already did some of the work.

I think there's a lot than can be done in this field - not with micropayments, which everybody seems to think about first when they see this. What I find a lot more interesting is the possibility of many competing Internet currencies not tied to any national one.

How about turning HN karma into a currency? Probably no mass-market appeal... what's lacking is a killer application for digital money and when it comes, it'll probably be in a form that doesn't seem like money to us now.

daeken3• 17 years ago

I wish I had the answers for where to go with this, because there's no doubt in my mind it's the Next Big Thing (TM). That said, I strongly suggest reading Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingd...), as his Whuffie system seems like a path that needs to be taken, somehow.

sho5• 17 years ago

Unfortunately he doesn't go into much detail about how Whuffie would actually work. I agree that some kind of karma system will eventually replace money, but the devil's in the details, and Doctorow offers precious few.

wmf2• 17 years ago

What I find a lot more interesting is the possibility of many competing Internet currencies not tied to any national one.

Would you also find it interesting to be indicted for money laundering? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/e-gold/

jonasvp2• 17 years ago

Well, it would probably be an interesting experience... not that I would care to find out. That's why I said the killer application would probably not look like money to us.

Take Youtube, for instance: people go to considerable lengths to create videos that others find interesting. Then they sit glued to the screen watching the view counter go up. There's a currency: people paying with their time (which everybody only has a fixed amount of) for someone's work creating videos.

Now have some ISP give extra bandwidth to people with Youtube videos over x thousand views. It doesn't cost them much "real" money since bandwidth is more or less a fixed cost but you have turned "virtual" money into a currency.

Granted, the example is a bit contrived but you can see where I'm going with this.

lucifer• 17 years ago

Thanks for the wired link.

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

With such light sentences, I suspect many people would. E-gold continues to operate and the founders ~8 week so of community service and a $200 were pretty light punishments, (although he's apparently deeply in debt, not least due to legal fees). Their main breach of the law seems to be in not complying with the existing regulations on money-transmittal businesses - and basically the production was saying that the only reason you exchange gold is for that purpose.

I don't know if transferable coupons redeemable for in-kind services would meet that same test, or surely Blizzard would have been prosecuted over tolerating real-money-trading in World of Warcraft assets.

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

How about turning HN karma into a currency?

Strangely enough I had a dream the other night where I was going to a HN meet with my friend (next SF one will be early September, BTW - and I owe 2 people coffee and didn't email them yet...sorry!) and when I got there, there was a vending machine where you could exchange your karma for everything from pants (?) to programming books.

I woke up laughing because this was so obviously stupid, but then I started to consider that if HN was a more conventional site with advertisers and sponsors, rewarding the higher-ranked posts and users with discounts from the merchant sponsors would actually make perfect sense. It's very obvious on a lot of niche forums who the community leaders are, and how much they influence the thinking (and often purchasing decisions) of others.

UpFromTheGut• 17 years ago

What is the HN meet? Can you give more information?

sidmitra• 17 years ago

Bet your twitter followers. There's a though :-)

markherpel• 17 years ago

Try our monthly magazine for this topic DGCmagazine http://www.dgcmagazine.com

(digital gold currency magazine)

anthonymc• 17 years ago

Neal Stephenson has some things to say about this in Cryptonomicon. Great book.

hughster• 17 years ago

Your e-cash for the Internet must be transferrable in and out of your pocket as well. The same money you use on eBay should be usable at the convenience store. Mondex, etc. were the right idea (though tied to local currencies) but ahead of their time for the technology. Maybe time to start thinking along those lines again?

lionheart• 17 years ago

The question is, is there anything else that is universally useful that we can use as a basis for the currency?

How about something like Amazon Turk? Except you don't get paid in cash, you get paid in points. All points had to have been generated by somebody doing a small, useful service for somebody else.

Barry_Seal• 17 years ago

I've been thinking about software to create economic instruments from information (e.g., source code) that you could exchange for micropayments. Can you recommend open source packages that might be useful for issuance and trading?

How to make a mint: The cryptography of anonymous electronic cash

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