e-coin concept
mdsw...@gmail.com
ferret out refinements but, I was wondering if would be feasible to
create an encrypted $1 e-coin that would be backed and distributed by
the Federal Reserve (the guys that print dollar bills). This coin would
be exchanged for goods and services as freely as dollar bills are today
and would have individual serial numbers, just like the dollar bill.
Each encrypted e-coin would be a file (format to be determined) and
have a physical memory size, be purchased from your bank or the Federal
Reserve itself and could be stored and distributed on jump-drives. The
larger the jump-drive the more e-coins it could hold.
Your home computer would keep track of your encrypted e-coins by serial
number and would load your jump-drive with e-coins. Internet purchases
would be made from your computer by exchanging e-coins for the item.
If you wanted to make a store purchase you would simply insert your usb
jump-drive into the cash register's usb port, key in a password or pin
number and the requisite number of e-coins would deducted from the jump
drive. Change would be made in smaller increment e-change loaded onto
your jump-drive. E-change would be converted to e-coins when you synced
the jump-drive back up to your home computer. E-change would not have
serial numbers and the conversion to e-coins would involve exchanging
e-change for e-coins through your bank or the Federal Reserve because a
new serial number would be issued. Exchange of e-coins between
individuals would be as simple as e-mailing e-coins over the internet.
These e-coins on the jump-drive would be independent of your bank
account and not linked in any way, so security of you account is
assured.
If the jump-drive was lost or stolen your could re-apply for specific
serial numbers, as the e-coins on the lost drive would be unusable by
the finder without the password or pin number, plus the e-coins are
encrypted. There would be a database of currently circulating e-coins
by serial number to verify used and unused e-coins on your specific
jump drive (similar to travelers checks). These e-coins would be immune
or impractical to breaking their encryption as their individual value
would be only $1.
Eventually, as trust in the system increased, I can envision being paid
by your employer in e-coins and taxes being collected in e-coins. As
the system grew in acceptance the whole economy of the world could be
linked by e-coins as a single medium of exchange, but thats far in the
future. Right no I want you to explore (shoot holes in...) the
practicality of this system, so your reply is welcome.
Now, I know that ideas are not patentable so I just want to document
that this idea came to me in a dream at 4:42 am Mountain time on August
15, 2006.
Please give me feed back as to the practicality and feasibility of such
a system of exchange. Lets have fun with it and see where this one
goes.
Regards
Michael D. Swaine
msw...@cox.net
Nospam
> This is a work in process and needs some philosophical discussion to
> ferret out refinements but, I was wondering if would be feasible to
> create an encrypted $1 e-coin
Google is your friend. If you want to dive deeper into the subject you can
get "Applied cryptography" by Bruce Schneier.
The concept of e-cash was around for quite some time. Many math algorithms
was proposed and debated. It is a pretty hard problem and researchers are
still tinkering with it despite the fact that some schema of e-cash are
already in use today.
There are a couple requirements for e-cash to fullfill:
- anonymity. If I buy smtg from you with e-cash and you buy smtg else with
it, there must be no way for the third person (or anyone else) to trace
that particular e-cash back to me.
- no double spending. Information can be copied. If I make a copy of my
e-cash the copy is as good as the original. 2 or more persons can try to
spend the same "e-coin" simultaneously from different vendors. Of course,
you can deny offline transactions and require the authorization of each
payment with the bank. But this imply that at any transaction the bank is
informed about who from who buy stuff and this is a direct violation of the
first requirement.
There were a couple of algorithms based on nonreversible function proposed
to be able to verify online the authenticity of a coin without disclosing
the serial number of the coin itself to the bank.
- offline transactions. There are cases when an transaction have to take
place betwen 2 parties without a connection to the bank. In that case the
elimination of double spending is very difficult. Models involving some
trusted hardware were proposed to solve this issue.
- transaction denial is a form of double spending. I give you e-cash for a
product but I keep my copy and claim that you actually stoled them from me.
> Now, I know that ideas are not patentable so I just want to document
> that this idea came to me in a dream at 4:42 am Mountain time on August
> 15, 2006.
There are there already tens of patents for different algorithms involved in
e-cash :-)
vjp...@at.biostrategist.dot.dot.com
in short, SuperNows and eMoney (your Kinko's card, your bus card..)
made money supply unmeasurable (M1 Wenninger FRNBYQR ca 1987; M2
Partland FRBNYQR ca 1992; cf Economist caption "Broad Money Al" ca
1993 - ie Greenspan then used M3)
We are back to pre-FRB "Privately-printed commodity-based currency"
where one of the evils was supposedly that folks used rail tickets as
cash.
- = -
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Reagan Mozart Pindus BioStrategist
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/vjp2/vasos.htm
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
[Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards]
[Yellary Clinton & Yellalot Spitzer: Nasty Together]
Zerge
mdsw...@gmail.com wrote:
> This is a work in process and needs some philosophical discussion to
> ferret out refinements but, I was wondering if would be feasible to
> create an encrypted $1 e-coin that would be backed and distributed by
> the Federal Reserve (the guys that print dollar bills).
You see, most of the money in the world already exists in electronic
form. Physical cash is only a small fraction of the overall currency in
existence. Most currency is nothing but data in the banks' databases,
and most of the big businesses pay their transactions via bank
transfers, not physical cash.
Just today I paid my credit card via Internet. My bank debited my
account and credited American Express. In a few days American Express
will instruct its bank to debit their account and credit the accounts
of the companies from which I purchased stuff. Not a single physical
bill exchanged hands.