7 ms·

The Ecash Act

38 points by simonpure 5y ago

cobbal 5y ago
"verify funds locally via a dedicated or trusted computing environment located on the device itself" This probably can't go wrong, and certainly wouldn't motivate groundbreaking research into breaking TPMs.
- giaour 5y ago
  > This probably can't go wrong, and certainly wouldn't motivate groundbreaking research into breaking TPMs Is the e-cash proposal qualitatively different from Apple Pay (or other phone wallets designed to hold credit cards) in this regard?
  - novok 5y ago
    Credit cards are centrally managed by a bank, need network communications and have transaction reversibility. This is literally a P2P system and their solution to avoid double spends is to have the device's root user not be the owners of such devices basically with something that is TPM like. If you break the TPM and get device or key control, then you can double spend. Double spending victims will find out they've been fooled when they go redeem their ecash for non-ecash and find out someone else already redeemed it. This is why bitcoin was such an innovation, because it prevented double spending, and it also made it you didn't need to trust a central ledger database maintainer (aka bank) to not mess with the ledger either and it let you do it over a distributed network! I think they're really talking about chaumian ecash with this act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash
    - giaour 5y ago
      I get that it's better (from the victim's perspective) to have to deal with fraudulent credit card transactions, but I don't get the difference from the point of view of the fraudster. If anything, breaking Apple Pay would be better than cracking a hardware wallet containing ecash, since someone's credit limit on the linked cards would generally be greater than the amount of cash they have on hand.
      - cobbal 5y ago
        If you break Apple Pay on your device, you can essentially get... your own credit card number. If you break open an e-$100 bill you get as many copies of that hundred dollars as you can spend before getting caught.
        giaour 5y ago
        Ah, I thought you were talking about the individual holder's risk of theft, not the system's risk of counterfeiting. My understanding from the article is that the TPM would be used to prevent theft, and counterfeiting would be prevented by something like RSA blind signatures (e.g., http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chaum.BlindSigForPayment.1982.PDF http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chau...)
- dv_dt 5y ago
  Even if you somehow mandated a special ecash chip, #2 with #4 would seem to be very difficult to secure - with all the motivation in the world to crack. It's the clipper chip, except this time with digital cash! Seems like it would also have privacy and gov't monitoring concerns.
sokoloff 5y ago
This seems interesting in many regards. I read through trying to find information about how to segregate e-cash as you might do with cash today. “I’m going to buy an Aeron from a Craigslist seller. I want to take only $300 with me, so that if I’m robbed, that’s all I’m out.” “I want to give my kid $20 to go to the store and buy whatever they want.” It wasn’t clear to me how to do that (would I have multiple e-cash devices? One that stays at home and several that I can take with me?)
- giaour 5y ago
  It's all hypothetical at the moment, but that scenario would seem to be supported by the section on devices: https://ecashact.us/#devices https://ecashact.us/#devices. You would need a separate device capable of transferring funds between bearer devices, but those would presumably be widely available, as every merchant would also need one to accept ecash for a transaction or to issue a refund. So for instance, you might transfer $X/week to an app on your kid's phone for lunch money, or put $X on your "walking around" card, both of which could draw from a different instrument you leave at home that has a larger reserve on it.
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    I wonder how they will deal with theft? You wouldn't need to be at an ATM to be robbed of all the money in your bank. A thief could just walk up in broad daylight, hold you up, make you put your card in and transfer everything out of your bank right now and then walk away. If you made the mistake of having everything available right now you could lose it all in a matter of minutes.
    - giaour 5y ago
      Yeah, that would be terrible! I would expect that this would be reframed a user education issue, as in, don't carry more ecash on you than you're willing to lose (same as physical cash). That would only be workable if they made it easy to maintain multiple instruments and transfer funds between them.
djrogers 5y ago
Interesting idea, but the skeptic in me can't see how a bunch of politicians will allow this through without watering down the privacy stuff to the point that it's completely not private. This is the same august body that has repeatedly pushed for breakable encryption, backdoors, and surveillance requirements on technology - give them a chance to start with a new technology completely from scratch, and they'll likely do the same
michaelt 5y ago
> In contrast to ledger-based systems (including those that use a blockchain and/or distributed-ledger rather than a centralized ledge), which prevent double-spending by verifying unspent balances against a common record of all previous transactions, e-cash devices verify funds locally via a dedicated or trusted computing environment located on the device itself. This document is admirably clear about what they're attempting to provide! But I can't help but think this requirement is very demanding - most stored value cards these days are for small amounts, and can mirror transactions to a central database, if they suspect cards are being tampered with. There are a handful of devices that are hardened against tampering by the person who possesses them (game console antipiracy features, iphone activation lock) - but most of them took several attempts to get right.
mimsee 5y ago
Is the money we currently use not just an integer in a database somewhere? When a government or whomever chooses to "print" more money, do they actually print it or just allow banks to insert a new row with N amount? I'm trying to grasp the reasons on why governments would like to introduce a "more digital currency than today" but not necessarily a cryptocurrency as that would cede control and how all that relates to the digitalness of money.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  Today dollars are held and transacted through a number of systems/banks. As such, the government doesn't have a central place to monitor and or interrupt its subject's transactions. This and the removal of cash is the primary power play of a CBDC. As for the creation of dollars today, it's kind of like flipping bits in a computer, but through a network of banks that get their fountain of debt backings from the Federal Reserve (or insert particular Fiat's bank here) as a central bank. So the bit flipping happens at the top and is distributed to member banks at very low interest rates. I personally think the government should let people pick what they think is money for themselves. Of course they won't as the dollar and other fiat systems are their primary means of control.
  - kayamon 5y ago
    Is there a good reason why the new money doesn't just get sent by mail to every individual citizen equally, rather than being handed out only to large banks?
    - reedjosh 5y ago
      Well, I don't think there's even a good reason for the system to begin with, but generally I think the reasoning posited is something like: Debt is issued to those that are believed can pay it back. Giant low interest loans are given to the member banks and they due diligence on smaller banks. The whole thing is a tree of larger institutions lending to smaller ones, and eventually the money makes it to markets that interact with actual customers -- mortgages and credit lines. In this way debt is limited to those that are expected to largely pay it back. Over time, more and more of the dollars in the system are owed to someone else. Our dollars literally come into existence as debt. This is the true source of inflation, but some make arguments about velocity of money and whatnot. The defaulting of debts and subsequent vacuum where debt based dollars used to be is also the actual cause of the so call 'business cycle'.
advisedwang 5y ago
I was curious who created this site and why. It seems to be by this professor [1] who also has the bill in their twitter bio, so I assume they are a major proponent or initiator. He seems to be cut from the mold of someone that believes the initial promise of bitcoin (freedom from monetary policy etc) but wants government regulation to prevent abuses of the system. [1] https://willamette.edu/law/faculty/profiles/grey/index.html https://willamette.edu/law/faculty/profiles/grey/index.html
- reedjosh 5y ago
  > but wants government regulation to prevent abuses of the system. But government is the original abuser of the system. That's _the_ reason cypherpunks built and adopted Bitcoin. Bitcoin was just the first digital money the government couldn't shutdown. It had shutdown centralized versions prior. Now, Monero is better for privacy, but Bitcoin remains the `Gold Standard` for government resistant digital currency, and none of the other currencies would be in existence had Bitcoin not paved the way to make governments accept cryptos.
0des 5y ago
Interesting that the word privacy is peppered throughout, and the comparison that it is private "like cash". Cash is not fungible.
- sephlietz 5y ago
  "Cash is not fungible." What do you mean?
  - 0des 5y ago
    fungibility is a binary quality where one thing is indistinguishable from another. Sites like whereisgeorge.com use this feature of non-fungibility, as an example, to show where the money has been. By virtue of this non-fungible quality, not all dollars are equal. Imagine you are a business owner, and someone pays with cash, and part of those bills are marked, or observed, as part of a criminal act like bank robbery or drug buy, you name it. As the business owner, that money can and will be seized and your operations will be complicated as a result of something outside of your control. In a perfect world, you just show how you got the money and there is no problem, but what if you couldn't? What if you as the business owner have paid your rent with this cash, and your landlord is the one who is targeted for questioning, and deciding to avoid the hassle or speculation they just decide to terminate your lease agreement? Fungibility means every dollar is indistinguishable (in value) from the rest, and for this reason, cash is not fungible.
    - giaour 5y ago
      What would you propose qualifies as a private instrument given this definition? Anything with a public ledger lends itself to really detailed forensic accounting, and durable goods tend to be uniquely identifiable. Gold can be melted and reforged, but it could be chemically altered so that it would remain traceable.
      - 0des 5y ago
        If you mean only digital assets, Monero is one.
maxk42 5y ago
This is how it begins... mandate a "privacy-respecting" electronic currency capable of offline, anonymous, peer-to-peer payments. Then a few years later, mandate an exception for convicted criminals: gotta get their money to pay the victims, after all. Then later still mandate an exception for suspected drug traffickers or money launderers: we have to know where the money's been. Pretty soon anyone the government mandates will have their money frozen for any reason they choose.
- giaour 5y ago
  ...those exceptions already exist? It sounds like you're describing court orders and civil forfeiture, both of which let the government take your cash, durable goods, deposit account contents, stocks, bonds, cryptocurrencies, etc.
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    The government has to know about your transactions and has to know where your cash is in these cases. The point is privacy like _cash_ -- not like digital bank transfers.
    - giaour 5y ago
      From the article: > An E-Cash device is any piece of secured hardware issued and/or authorised by the government for the purpose of receiving, holding, and transferring e-cash balances. > In contrast to ledger-based systems (including those that use a blockchain and/or distributed-ledger rather than a centralized ledge), which prevent double-spending by verifying unspent balances against a common record of all previous transactions, e-cash devices verify funds locally via a dedicated or trusted computing environment located on the device itself. > This allows it to facilitate both offline and genuine peer-to-peer transactions without generating transactional data or requiring the approval of third party intermediaries or network validator nodes.
  - daenz 5y ago
    It sounds like you're suggesting that because they already exist in some more-bureaucratic form (seizing cash isn't logistically straightforward), there is no meaningful change to making these things digital and "push button".
djschnei 5y ago
> 1. Denominated in U.S. dollars; > 2. Issued and guaranteed by the U.S. government; > 3. Available for retail use by the public; > 4. Not reliant on a common ledger or any third-party payments processing intermediary; and > 5. Capable of anonymous, offline, peer-to-peer payments. We already have cash... cash does all these things.
- tantalor 5y ago
  Maybe ecash can be backed up so you can't lose it?
olah_1 5y ago
It's not a CBDC, but it's not in competition with a CBDC either. I'm most curious how this is different from GNU Taler. I guess Taler is still ledger-based instead of hardware-based?
RyanShook 5y ago
Among other concerns, this seems especially susceptible to fraud.
ruuda 5y ago
Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipknip https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipknip
api 5y ago
> The bill directs the Secretary of the Treasury to develop and pilot digital dollar technologies that replicate the privacy-respecting features of physical cash, in order to promote greater financial inclusion, maximize consumer protection and data privacy, and advance U.S. efforts to develop and regulate digital assets. I will be incredibly skeptical of any privacy respecting claims unless the design truly is cryptographically secure. Also cash is robust. We are creating a situation where all economic activity becomes impossible if the network is down. With reliance on debit cards we're almost there already but this would remove cash as a fallback if it truly phased out physical cash. I'm not sure that is wise.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  > unless the design truly is cryptographically secure. You should also be asking for a system that prevents further legislature from removing the privacy respecting aspect of it. But at that point, Monero already exists.
daenz 5y ago
I'm against this for many reasons related to increased potential for authoritarianism and abuse of freedom, but also because it undermines a desirable quality of cash: if our digital infrastructure suffers a significant outage, physical transactions must continue. We must always be able to "bootstrap" back from the physical realm while we repair the digital realm. If everything moves to "ecash", that becomes impossible. It makes us less robust. It's like putting the recovery codes for your password manager inside your password manager.
- novok 5y ago
  From what I see, this system is supposed to run independently of centralized servers, so as long as you can make some small amount of electricity eventually, it will work. If that is not possible, then you have bigger problems to worry about and no more printing presses either, so humanity will make some alternative fairly quickly.
worldmerge 5y ago
I haven't read the whole thing yet but could the gov recreate Monero? Or just fork it? It seems like they already did the work to do a privacy respecting digital payment system, why re-invent the wheel.
- Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
  Is Monero untraceable? Then the government don't want untraceable cryptocurrency.
kkfx 5y ago
Digital money in modern world is needed, but not to substitute physical cash. It's needed for instance to buy thing remotely, to invest, to quickly transfer non-marginal amount of money etc. In that sense a completely open and public payment infrastructure instead of SWIFT, e-payment circuits etc is more then needed, it must be MANDATORY by law and designed in an open manner not only in term of code but also in term of usage. Cash stay aside, because there is no trusted hw, no guarantee of functioning in various situations than cash. So imposing OpenBank-alike APIs for all, private Citizens included, possibly with each transaction digitally signed by three parties (paying, paid and State-controlled central bank) and easy to store locally by any of those three should be mandatory, demolishing private fintech of course, leaving cash should and must be equally mandatory.
donclark 5y ago
I’m curious what tech stack they build it on. I suspect the use cases will go well beyond currency to voting, passports, health, academic, court records. Institutional systems might use a public block chain for transparency. I don’t think they’ll bake their own but rather make a king. To Dale’s point on on boarding. Every institution will want identity proofing and what is good enough proof and for what purpose. This is an interesting concept building on Web3. Is Web3 is already dead and the reason is on boarding? Transitive trust allows a participation threshold to be reached to build near ubiquitous implicit public trust. That might be scalable to onboard with some measurable identity proofing beyond KYC SSN garbage. :-) https://digitaltrust.vc/thesis/ https://digitaltrust.vc/thesis/
jl2718 5y ago
Anybody who was in Iraq or Afghanistan might remember the “Eagle Cash Card” issued by the treasury as a digital wallet. It was a cryptographic smart card that could be used offline as a bearer instrument, exactly as described here.
Georgelemental 5y ago
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

38 points by simonpure 5y ago

"verify funds locally via a dedicated or trusted computing environment located on the device itself" This probably can't go wrong, and certainly wouldn't motivate groundbreaking research into breaking TPMs.

giaour 5y ago
> This probably can't go wrong, and certainly wouldn't motivate groundbreaking research into breaking TPMs Is the e-cash proposal qualitatively different from Apple Pay (or other phone wallets designed to hold credit cards) in this regard?
- novok 5y ago
  Credit cards are centrally managed by a bank, need network communications and have transaction reversibility. This is literally a P2P system and their solution to avoid double spends is to have the device's root user not be the owners of such devices basically with something that is TPM like. If you break the TPM and get device or key control, then you can double spend. Double spending victims will find out they've been fooled when they go redeem their ecash for non-ecash and find out someone else already redeemed it. This is why bitcoin was such an innovation, because it prevented double spending, and it also made it you didn't need to trust a central ledger database maintainer (aka bank) to not mess with the ledger either and it let you do it over a distributed network! I think they're really talking about chaumian ecash with this act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash
  - giaour 5y ago
    I get that it's better (from the victim's perspective) to have to deal with fraudulent credit card transactions, but I don't get the difference from the point of view of the fraudster. If anything, breaking Apple Pay would be better than cracking a hardware wallet containing ecash, since someone's credit limit on the linked cards would generally be greater than the amount of cash they have on hand.
    - cobbal 5y ago
      If you break Apple Pay on your device, you can essentially get... your own credit card number. If you break open an e-$100 bill you get as many copies of that hundred dollars as you can spend before getting caught.
      - giaour 5y ago
        Ah, I thought you were talking about the individual holder's risk of theft, not the system's risk of counterfeiting. My understanding from the article is that the TPM would be used to prevent theft, and counterfeiting would be prevented by something like RSA blind signatures (e.g., http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chaum.BlindSigForPayment.1982.PDF http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chau...)
dv_dt 5y ago
Even if you somehow mandated a special ecash chip, #2 with #4 would seem to be very difficult to secure - with all the motivation in the world to crack. It's the clipper chip, except this time with digital cash! Seems like it would also have privacy and gov't monitoring concerns.

sokoloff 5y ago

This seems interesting in many regards. I read through trying to find information about how to segregate e-cash as you might do with cash today. “I’m going to buy an Aeron from a Craigslist seller. I want to take only $300 with me, so that if I’m robbed, that’s all I’m out.” “I want to give my kid $20 to go to the store and buy whatever they want.” It wasn’t clear to me how to do that (would I have multiple e-cash devices? One that stays at home and several that I can take with me?)

giaour 5y ago
It's all hypothetical at the moment, but that scenario would seem to be supported by the section on devices: https://ecashact.us/#devices https://ecashact.us/#devices. You would need a separate device capable of transferring funds between bearer devices, but those would presumably be widely available, as every merchant would also need one to accept ecash for a transaction or to issue a refund. So for instance, you might transfer $X/week to an app on your kid's phone for lunch money, or put $X on your "walking around" card, both of which could draw from a different instrument you leave at home that has a larger reserve on it.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  I wonder how they will deal with theft? You wouldn't need to be at an ATM to be robbed of all the money in your bank. A thief could just walk up in broad daylight, hold you up, make you put your card in and transfer everything out of your bank right now and then walk away. If you made the mistake of having everything available right now you could lose it all in a matter of minutes.
  - giaour 5y ago
    Yeah, that would be terrible! I would expect that this would be reframed a user education issue, as in, don't carry more ecash on you than you're willing to lose (same as physical cash). That would only be workable if they made it easy to maintain multiple instruments and transfer funds between them.

djrogers 5y ago

Interesting idea, but the skeptic in me can't see how a bunch of politicians will allow this through without watering down the privacy stuff to the point that it's completely not private. This is the same august body that has repeatedly pushed for breakable encryption, backdoors, and surveillance requirements on technology - give them a chance to start with a new technology completely from scratch, and they'll likely do the same

michaelt 5y ago

> In contrast to ledger-based systems (including those that use a blockchain and/or distributed-ledger rather than a centralized ledge), which prevent double-spending by verifying unspent balances against a common record of all previous transactions, e-cash devices verify funds locally via a dedicated or trusted computing environment located on the device itself. This document is admirably clear about what they're attempting to provide! But I can't help but think this requirement is very demanding - most stored value cards these days are for small amounts, and can mirror transactions to a central database, if they suspect cards are being tampered with. There are a handful of devices that are hardened against tampering by the person who possesses them (game console antipiracy features, iphone activation lock) - but most of them took several attempts to get right.

mimsee 5y ago

Is the money we currently use not just an integer in a database somewhere? When a government or whomever chooses to "print" more money, do they actually print it or just allow banks to insert a new row with N amount? I'm trying to grasp the reasons on why governments would like to introduce a "more digital currency than today" but not necessarily a cryptocurrency as that would cede control and how all that relates to the digitalness of money.

reedjosh 5y ago
Today dollars are held and transacted through a number of systems/banks. As such, the government doesn't have a central place to monitor and or interrupt its subject's transactions. This and the removal of cash is the primary power play of a CBDC. As for the creation of dollars today, it's kind of like flipping bits in a computer, but through a network of banks that get their fountain of debt backings from the Federal Reserve (or insert particular Fiat's bank here) as a central bank. So the bit flipping happens at the top and is distributed to member banks at very low interest rates. I personally think the government should let people pick what they think is money for themselves. Of course they won't as the dollar and other fiat systems are their primary means of control.
- kayamon 5y ago
  Is there a good reason why the new money doesn't just get sent by mail to every individual citizen equally, rather than being handed out only to large banks?
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    Well, I don't think there's even a good reason for the system to begin with, but generally I think the reasoning posited is something like: Debt is issued to those that are believed can pay it back. Giant low interest loans are given to the member banks and they due diligence on smaller banks. The whole thing is a tree of larger institutions lending to smaller ones, and eventually the money makes it to markets that interact with actual customers -- mortgages and credit lines. In this way debt is limited to those that are expected to largely pay it back. Over time, more and more of the dollars in the system are owed to someone else. Our dollars literally come into existence as debt. This is the true source of inflation, but some make arguments about velocity of money and whatnot. The defaulting of debts and subsequent vacuum where debt based dollars used to be is also the actual cause of the so call 'business cycle'.

advisedwang 5y ago

I was curious who created this site and why. It seems to be by this professor [1] who also has the bill in their twitter bio, so I assume they are a major proponent or initiator. He seems to be cut from the mold of someone that believes the initial promise of bitcoin (freedom from monetary policy etc) but wants government regulation to prevent abuses of the system. [1] https://willamette.edu/law/faculty/profiles/grey/index.html https://willamette.edu/law/faculty/profiles/grey/index.html

reedjosh 5y ago
> but wants government regulation to prevent abuses of the system. But government is the original abuser of the system. That's _the_ reason cypherpunks built and adopted Bitcoin. Bitcoin was just the first digital money the government couldn't shutdown. It had shutdown centralized versions prior. Now, Monero is better for privacy, but Bitcoin remains the `Gold Standard` for government resistant digital currency, and none of the other currencies would be in existence had Bitcoin not paved the way to make governments accept cryptos.

0des 5y ago

Interesting that the word privacy is peppered throughout, and the comparison that it is private "like cash". Cash is not fungible.

sephlietz 5y ago
"Cash is not fungible." What do you mean?
- 0des 5y ago
  fungibility is a binary quality where one thing is indistinguishable from another. Sites like whereisgeorge.com use this feature of non-fungibility, as an example, to show where the money has been. By virtue of this non-fungible quality, not all dollars are equal. Imagine you are a business owner, and someone pays with cash, and part of those bills are marked, or observed, as part of a criminal act like bank robbery or drug buy, you name it. As the business owner, that money can and will be seized and your operations will be complicated as a result of something outside of your control. In a perfect world, you just show how you got the money and there is no problem, but what if you couldn't? What if you as the business owner have paid your rent with this cash, and your landlord is the one who is targeted for questioning, and deciding to avoid the hassle or speculation they just decide to terminate your lease agreement? Fungibility means every dollar is indistinguishable (in value) from the rest, and for this reason, cash is not fungible.
  - giaour 5y ago
    What would you propose qualifies as a private instrument given this definition? Anything with a public ledger lends itself to really detailed forensic accounting, and durable goods tend to be uniquely identifiable. Gold can be melted and reforged, but it could be chemically altered so that it would remain traceable.
    - 0des 5y ago
      If you mean only digital assets, Monero is one.

maxk42 5y ago

This is how it begins... mandate a "privacy-respecting" electronic currency capable of offline, anonymous, peer-to-peer payments. Then a few years later, mandate an exception for convicted criminals: gotta get their money to pay the victims, after all. Then later still mandate an exception for suspected drug traffickers or money launderers: we have to know where the money's been. Pretty soon anyone the government mandates will have their money frozen for any reason they choose.

giaour 5y ago
...those exceptions already exist? It sounds like you're describing court orders and civil forfeiture, both of which let the government take your cash, durable goods, deposit account contents, stocks, bonds, cryptocurrencies, etc.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  The government has to know about your transactions and has to know where your cash is in these cases. The point is privacy like _cash_ -- not like digital bank transfers.
  - giaour 5y ago
    From the article: > An E-Cash device is any piece of secured hardware issued and/or authorised by the government for the purpose of receiving, holding, and transferring e-cash balances. > In contrast to ledger-based systems (including those that use a blockchain and/or distributed-ledger rather than a centralized ledge), which prevent double-spending by verifying unspent balances against a common record of all previous transactions, e-cash devices verify funds locally via a dedicated or trusted computing environment located on the device itself. > This allows it to facilitate both offline and genuine peer-to-peer transactions without generating transactional data or requiring the approval of third party intermediaries or network validator nodes.
- daenz 5y ago
  It sounds like you're suggesting that because they already exist in some more-bureaucratic form (seizing cash isn't logistically straightforward), there is no meaningful change to making these things digital and "push button".

djschnei 5y ago

> 1. Denominated in U.S. dollars; > 2. Issued and guaranteed by the U.S. government; > 3. Available for retail use by the public; > 4. Not reliant on a common ledger or any third-party payments processing intermediary; and > 5. Capable of anonymous, offline, peer-to-peer payments. We already have cash... cash does all these things.

tantalor 5y ago
Maybe ecash can be backed up so you can't lose it?

olah_1 5y ago

It's not a CBDC, but it's not in competition with a CBDC either. I'm most curious how this is different from GNU Taler. I guess Taler is still ledger-based instead of hardware-based?

RyanShook 5y ago

Among other concerns, this seems especially susceptible to fraud.

ruuda 5y ago

Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipknip https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipknip

api 5y ago

> The bill directs the Secretary of the Treasury to develop and pilot digital dollar technologies that replicate the privacy-respecting features of physical cash, in order to promote greater financial inclusion, maximize consumer protection and data privacy, and advance U.S. efforts to develop and regulate digital assets. I will be incredibly skeptical of any privacy respecting claims unless the design truly is cryptographically secure. Also cash is robust. We are creating a situation where all economic activity becomes impossible if the network is down. With reliance on debit cards we're almost there already but this would remove cash as a fallback if it truly phased out physical cash. I'm not sure that is wise.

reedjosh 5y ago
> unless the design truly is cryptographically secure. You should also be asking for a system that prevents further legislature from removing the privacy respecting aspect of it. But at that point, Monero already exists.

daenz 5y ago

I'm against this for many reasons related to increased potential for authoritarianism and abuse of freedom, but also because it undermines a desirable quality of cash: if our digital infrastructure suffers a significant outage, physical transactions must continue. We must always be able to "bootstrap" back from the physical realm while we repair the digital realm. If everything moves to "ecash", that becomes impossible. It makes us less robust. It's like putting the recovery codes for your password manager inside your password manager.

novok 5y ago
From what I see, this system is supposed to run independently of centralized servers, so as long as you can make some small amount of electricity eventually, it will work. If that is not possible, then you have bigger problems to worry about and no more printing presses either, so humanity will make some alternative fairly quickly.

worldmerge 5y ago

I haven't read the whole thing yet but could the gov recreate Monero? Or just fork it? It seems like they already did the work to do a privacy respecting digital payment system, why re-invent the wheel.

Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
Is Monero untraceable? Then the government don't want untraceable cryptocurrency.

kkfx 5y ago

Digital money in modern world is needed, but not to substitute physical cash. It's needed for instance to buy thing remotely, to invest, to quickly transfer non-marginal amount of money etc. In that sense a completely open and public payment infrastructure instead of SWIFT, e-payment circuits etc is more then needed, it must be MANDATORY by law and designed in an open manner not only in term of code but also in term of usage. Cash stay aside, because there is no trusted hw, no guarantee of functioning in various situations than cash. So imposing OpenBank-alike APIs for all, private Citizens included, possibly with each transaction digitally signed by three parties (paying, paid and State-controlled central bank) and easy to store locally by any of those three should be mandatory, demolishing private fintech of course, leaving cash should and must be equally mandatory.

donclark 5y ago

I’m curious what tech stack they build it on. I suspect the use cases will go well beyond currency to voting, passports, health, academic, court records. Institutional systems might use a public block chain for transparency. I don’t think they’ll bake their own but rather make a king. To Dale’s point on on boarding. Every institution will want identity proofing and what is good enough proof and for what purpose. This is an interesting concept building on Web3. Is Web3 is already dead and the reason is on boarding? Transitive trust allows a participation threshold to be reached to build near ubiquitous implicit public trust. That might be scalable to onboard with some measurable identity proofing beyond KYC SSN garbage. :-) https://digitaltrust.vc/thesis/ https://digitaltrust.vc/thesis/

jl2718 5y ago

Anybody who was in Iraq or Afghanistan might remember the “Eagle Cash Card” issued by the treasury as a digital wallet. It was a cryptographic smart card that could be used offline as a bearer instrument, exactly as described here.

Georgelemental 5y ago

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/