> Seems like a lot of work to offer a less functional alternative to a VISA gift card purchased with cash. Not sure about Taler. But with Chaum's DigiCash from

> Seems like a lot of work to offer a less functional alternative to a VISA gift card purchased with cash. Not sure about Taler. But with Chaum's DigiCash from the 90s you could do micropayments and other fun stuff. The blind signatures gave Alice a way to pull out some amount of her "Cipherbucks" or whatever from her bank. Then she could PGP them to Bob, who could "uncryptography" them and redeem them at OverTheBorder Bank(tm). If I read correctly, Alice nests a unique number in her sealed thingy, and the the banks would keep an append-only record of these unique numbers. So it's something like this: 1. Alice's bank knows she made a request for $X cipherbucks 2. Bob's bank knows he made a deposit of $Z cipherbucks 3. Bob's bank knows the deposit is good because the unique ID isn't already in the database As for your question below-- doesn't that satisfy the "Know your customer" rules? It's functionally equivalent to cash so I don't see how it wouldn't Edit: I'm not sure of the properties of the transactions, so maybe $X and $Z have to be equal? No clue. Still, you get the idea...