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There's an interesting property of fully untraceable currency, and that's that it's possible to perform 'perfect crimes' [1]. Often the weakness in committing,
by DCKing 11y ago
There's an interesting property of fully untraceable currency, and that's that it's possible to perform 'perfect crimes' [1]. Often the weakness in committing, say, a kidnapping or a drug sale is handling the associated money obtained with it which can be traced back to people due to circumstances. Fully untraceable currency by definition completely avoids these circumstances.
The inevitable question "should we want this?" is moot because evidently such systems are possible (iff they provide a practical currency for such transactions) and will inevitably be used for this. Furthermore, Bitcoin already achieves something close to it in practice. It's just worth pointing out that untraceability will have nasty consequences as well as good ones.
As an interesting aside, David Chaum, who has lately been infamous for advocating ways to backdoor encryption, may be considered the father of fully untraceable (but not decentralized) digital currencies. Ironically, after [1] was published others in the cryptographic community spend a number of papers on building what they called 'fair' blind signatures, which constituted basically of varieties of Chaum's basic idea but where untraceability could be lifted by an "independent party posessing the right private key" (i.e. a public "police backdoor"). They were trying to backdoor Chaum's encryption...
[1]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465.9796&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465...
- otoburb 11y ago>>[...] others in the cryptographic community [built] what they called 'fair' blind signatures [...] where untraceability could be lifted by an "independent party posessing the right private key" (i.e. a public "police backdoor"). They were trying to backdoor Chaum's encryption... Chaum himself is advocating not just for any ol' backdoor, but for a flavour of "multi-sovereign-party public police backdoor" if you believe the Wired article that explained his proposal.[1] [1] http://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-anonymity-plan-to-end-the-crypto-wars/ http://www.wired.com/2016/01/david-chaum-father-of-online-an...
- dmix 11y agoCurrency is merely one investigative method. There are plenty of others and like all crypto systems there will be cracks, people will make OPSEC mistakes, and ultimately law enforcement agencies have access to hacking/CNE. Additionally, the money by itself may be anonymous, but that person will have to convert it to other currency or make purchases. Those purchases may be physical objects like cars, or rent, or any other large purchase which the person will have to demonstrate how they could afford to purchase it. The IRS would still be able to detect irregularities in consumption. If anything it will be a boone for the information security industry, they will have to stop selling snakeoil and start selling solutions that actually prevent peoples money from being stolen.