Author

Topic: Is the "anonymous banking by blind signatures" concept transferable to Bitcoin? (Read 1996 times)

legendary
Activity: 1288
Merit: 1080

I really would like to see a cryptocurrency that would use David Chaum's blind signature algorithm instead of ECDSA.
hero member
Activity: 602
Merit: 513
GLBSE Support [email protected]
You can either have distributed but non-anonymous money, or centralised and anonymous but not both. There is nothing preventing the two mixing.

For example you could have an Open-Transaction server that takes bitcoin and issues blinded tokens, those tokens get trade about (which is totally anonymous) and then after some time the people cash the tokens in for bitcoin.

As long as there are a good few people using the same server and there is a fair amount of activity (trading with tokens, depositing and withdrawing bitcoins) then it's anonymous.
xor
newbie
Activity: 11
Merit: 0
I once stumbled upon the following article:

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

Without trying to understand the maths of it / just treating it as a blackbox-lego-piece, I came up with the following vague, euphoric ideas in relation to allow payment for content on Freenet, unfortunately nobody on Freenet's mailing list was able to answer whether it is possible.

Quote
  Hi,

I have just read the following Wikipedia articles:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_internet_banking
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

I am not certain whether Freenet can meet the requirements for the mechanism
which is proposed in the article [1].
I am also not certain whether Bitcoin provides mechanisms for anonymous
transactions.

However, if we could combine Bitcoin with the mechanism in [1] and implement
it in plugins called "Freepay"  and "Freebank" this would for sure be a killer
application:

Consider Freepay being an implementation of Bitcoins on top of Freenet.
Consider Freebank being a framework for anonymous transactions over a bank
provider who runs Freebank.

Let the FPI (Freenet-foundation) provide a bank by running Freebank. Have a
transaction fee of a certain percentage. Allow both conversion of real money
into bitcoins and bitcoins into real money.

Now, if someone wants an anonymous person to insert a certain content, he asks
for that content on Freetalk (anonymous Forum systems on Freenet)
and offers a payment of N bitcoins.
If anyone uploads the content, the requester pays to the Freepay
account of the uploader. The fact that transaction between uploader and payer happened
is non-anonymous as with current bitcoin-system, the only difference is that it
runs on top of Freenet and therefore the real persons behind the on-Freenet-identities
are anonymous.

The uploader then does an anonymous transaction to his non-anonymous account
in the Freebank.
This transaction uses the mechanism described in [1] and therefore is anonymous.
The Freebank then pays out money in real currency to the owner of the account.

Nobody in reallife can punish the inserter for uploading the content because
the transaction from his anonymous account to his realmoney-account was
anonymous.

The FPI uses the transaction fees for financing the Freenet project and it's
bank services.
Anyone else can also provide a bank by running Freebank.

People who do not pay for inserts are punished by a web of trust on top of the
banking system. Malicious trust  values can be proved wrong automatically
because the payer can just show the cryptographic signature of the payment -
the payments between the anonymous entities are public as said above.
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