Topic: The Royal Canadian Mint just announced a new alternative to BitCoin - page 8. (Read 19978 times)

One particular thing I found interesting is that the field for the dollar amount in a transaction is only a 24-bit integer denominated in cents.  That means the system, by design, is being built with a hard coded limit of 16777216 cents, or $167,772.16 in Canadian dollars, per transaction.  That seemed like a very low limit for something being designed as "the future of currency"!

What are you talking about?

The point of hacking the card would be to extract the private keys and use those to create tx.
Tx that the the receiver's chip will validate as 100% authentic.

Card with $10USD
tx 1 for $10 USD
tx 2 for $10 USD
tx 3 for $10 USD
....
tx 1,000,000 for $10 USD.

In Bitcoin this is impossible because each tx is submitted to the blockchain.  The merchant getting tx2 will see tx1 on the blockchain and know it is fake.  With MintChip there is no central "ledger".  Each chip uses ONLY the tx is receives to verify if it is valid.  Nothing else.  No calls to trusted broker, no central ledger, no communication with central bank.

If you make a fake/duplicate tx which is signed as valid the receiver has no way to know it isn't valid.  In essence you just printed money.  Your logic is like saying nobody will ever counterfeit $20 bills because they are at most worth $20 ($20 is most commonly counterfeited bill).   Sure if you intend to only make 1 fake $20 bill it isn't worth it but making 1 million fake $20 bills isn't much harder than making 1.  Obviously nobody intending to counterfeit intends to only make a handful of fake bills.  

With digital currency making a trillion fake $10 tx is no harder than making 1 fake $10 tx.

And lastly obviously buying funds from the central bank wouldn't be fake funds would it?

Given every single "the secret is on the chip" system has been broken to think this one will be the impossible one is kinda naive.  At one time people said counterfeiting sat TV cards was impossible too.

If the microsd cards do all the encryption internally, then you need to physically get the encryption key out like they do with current smart card hacking, which means hours of work and massive expensive electron microscopes. And UNLIKE the satellite video hacking that goes on you need to do it for EACH and every private key you want to acquire, instead of one used by all devices in existance.

If you read the developer documents and the video they specifically say the system is designed to work on transactions under $10, and especially down to 1 cent. So this sytem is designed to be used on digital goods purchasing, or vending machines, or very small transactions.

This is solving a very specific and huge gap in current economy where small transactions are infeasable due to transaction fees. Limiting the value on a single card makes perfect sense as to make hacking it not worthwhile.

You are not suppose to use mintchips to pay for lunch or buy anything over $10. That is not its purpose, its purpose is for shifting very small amounts around between individuals. Its alot like the Ripple Project, where its not designed for a big company to collect much income. It is for many people to collect small income from each other and move it around amongst themselves.


How do you expect to make these millions of fake transactions? If you have to communicate with mintchip central to reload your "hacked" card that can only hold $10 maximum (this is an assumption i dont know for sure yet, but I have to assume it has a fairly low maximum load) And the time it would take you to hack many many cards would be infeasable.

I doubt it will take millions of dollars in hardware to break it but hypothetically lets say it did.
There is nothing that indicates the max per chip is $10 but lets say it is (honestly a chip w/ max of $10 is essentially useless.  couldn't even use it to settle up on a business dinner).

Still lets pretend both those conditions exist:
1 million tx of fake $10 ea = lots of fake money.

In essence it is like inflation but instead of the central bank inflating it is thieves who are inflating.  As the # of chip dollars grows in excess of the reserve the redemption rate of chip:physical will decline.

This is amazing.  It looks like this whole system is designed for the very low transaction amounts of 1cent to $10, and for OFFLINE transactions from individual to individual.

This isn't any kind of competitor to bitcoin, this is a companion product. Anything over $10 would make sense to use bitcoin, but you would also keep one or more mintchip cards in your phone etc. And transferring very small amounts person to person would use mintchip. I think its genius.

I would say the security concerns would be balanced by the fact each mintchip probably has a maximum balance of like $10. So it would cost millions of dollars of scanning electron microscope equipment to try and extract a private key to only get $10? Thats infeasible enough that it works perfectly fine I bet.

So winzip and Bitcoin are related.

Even if we exclude the fact of trusted brokers and central issuance there is the fundamental concept of security.

With Bitcoin what prevents you from cheating?  What prevents you from making coins out of thin air or spending the same coin a billion times?  The blockchain.  The consensus reached by the distributed network.   You don't send coins to the receiver you record the tx into the blockchain.

With MintChip there is no blockchain. There is no central ledger (centralized or decentralized).  What prevents security is the "chip".  Given every single chip ever made to control access to value (cellphones, sat TV, software, DVD/Bluray) has been broken it is highly unlikely MintChip won't also be broken.

With Bitcoin breaking the client is useless.  The security comes not from the client but from the network.  With MintChip there is a direct tangible benefit of breaking the chip.  A hacked chip would allow you to create tx which are worthless but completely undetectable by the recipient. 

Isn't there encryption involved as well? 

How much more of a link do you need to say they are related?

+1 !

Yay, more false information about bitcoin... -.-
The only link between bitcoin and mintchip is that it's digital as far as i can tell.

You got me! Upon hovering over the link, I learned it wasn't directed toward The Bitcoin Show.

Did you know the Canadian mint is discontinuing the penny? http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2012/03/29/federalbudget-flaherty-penny-cent.html

Also, Fast Company just released a similar article, one with Bitcoin in its title: http://www.fastcompany.com/1829662/canada-to-launch-its-own-version-of-bitcoin-called-mintchip?partner=gnews

~Bruno~

Since Canada will be able to print Mint Chip at will, maybe they found a way to buy into Bitcoin without all the hard work of running miners or trading bots.

I'll be waiting for a Prime Time tv show to be about Mint Chip.

Nope, my point exactly, and i think people will already be drooling over the idea... 'oh wow, if only this would be released to the public!'
Also, im just ranting out of frustration by how people react to bitcoin..

to be clear, the one video we're talking about is the video in the first link in this thread here:

http://developer.mintchipchallenge.com/

right?

Are there any videos showing this in practice?  Or is it not even ready for release yet?

Reasons why mintchip will succeed and be massively addopted and bitcoin will not:

- Videos, just look at that one single video they put out, it's better then all the bitcoin videos from over the past 2 years put together. (they know how to market their product)
- ... Hmm... that was it actually...

When talking to strangers and bring up bitcoin, they have never heard of it, none of them... (and yea, then it all starts over again 'ponzi scheme, scam, blabla...').
But this, this is the Royal Canadian Mint, or FED or whoever comes up with it. They have instant trust, specially with these smooth videos.

not yet. currently there is basically no ease of use. in the two demo apps if you want to pay someone you have to download a ValueRequestMessage which is a file minimum 200 bytes (can be even larger) then the user has to import it to his MitChip App and generate a signed response. send the file over to the merchant. merchant imports it.

of course in practice this will be significantly easier (NFC, QR Code, URL, callbacks), if all MintChip standardize on a way to exchange ValueRequestMessage+ValueMessage but right now Bitcoin usability is OK-ish and MintChip is abysmal.

The big win for MintChip is ease of use, which may lead to ubiquity. In every other respect, Bitcoin beats it.

Obviously the important feature here is the ability to make transfers without access to a central clearing house.  That's an advantage over Bitcoin.  And it doesn't seem that useful in a first world country.  I'm guessing this is designed for export, and will be aimed at developing countries with poor telecom/internet infrastructure.

Since Canada is set to maintain a huge export trade in natural resources, perhaps they are looking to collect enough foreign currencies to back this system, and parlay that into providing currency services globally.  Seems risky.

Which means they have likely already planned to have US military support.  So, is this the Dollar replacement?  Being beta-tested on those willing heathen socialist Canadians?  Chipcoin?  666, mark of the beast?  Do we all get one implanted?  And when it runs out of memory from too many transactions, we get to visit our friendly local "trusted broker" to have the contents downloaded for analysis and the transaction count reset?  Perhaps with a few extra chipcoins thrown his way, my trusted broker can be convinced to overlook some of my transactions, wink wink.  Perhaps he could even be convinced to up my chipcoin balance a bit.

I don't know.  I don't like the way this sounds.  It seems too ambitious.  Even the video showed all the transactions in USD.  And the development is aimed at Americans as well.  Normally, co-opting the US Dollar gets you liberated or thrown in jail.  Something is fishy.

If i don't see source code posted anywhere, then i don't treat a digital currency seriously.


Also, +1.

MintChip itself is nothing like Bitcoin, but its existence is good for Bitcoin.

This is HUGE for bitcoin.  Anything that legitimizes and introduces people to purely digital currency is good for bitcoin.  It will expand the market of people who can come into contact with bitcoin.  This is a good thing.  And exchange between mintwhatever and bitcoin will also be very easy to set up.  God I hope pokerstars allows cashouts to mintship.  I'm losing about 20% every fucking cashout!