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Chaum's system was centralized. A chaum token bank may be blinded but is still a great big single central point of failure and control— they can still inflate t

by nullc 14y ago

Chaum's system was centralized. A chaum token bank may be blinded but is still a great big single central point of failure and control— they can still inflate the currency— they can still selectively deny access. The centralization created a huge operating risk and would make any such effort untrustworthy just from the perspective of political exposure. The whole point of Bitcoin (http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-sour... was to build a zero trust decentralized system. Chaum's system provides some properties "perfectly" but they aren't the properties such a system needed to have in order to exist, much less be successful.

betterunix 14y ago
"A chaum token bank may be blinded but is still a great big single central point of failure and control...they can still selectively deny access." That is not really true when there is an offline transaction protocol; the bank can only deny access initially (e.g. the bank can refuse to let you open an account), but once you are in the system you can spend money or be paid without the bank's permission. It is also possible to create threshold systems where there is no single bank, so that there is no single point of failure. "Chaum's system provides some properties "perfectly" but they aren't the properties such a system needed to have in order to exist, much less be successful." I think protection against double spending is a pretty fundamental property for a digital cash system to be successful. People would not use Bitcoin if they did not believe that it protects them from double spending. My only real point in all of this is that Bitcoin does not provide that protection according to the standard used by cryptographers; in practice, nobody has pulled off a double spending attack yet, but everyone knows how to do it and it is not impractical by any stretch of the imagination.

by nullc 14y ago

betterunix 14y ago

"A chaum token bank may be blinded but is still a great big single central point of failure and control...they can still selectively deny access." That is not really true when there is an offline transaction protocol; the bank can only deny access initially (e.g. the bank can refuse to let you open an account), but once you are in the system you can spend money or be paid without the bank's permission. It is also possible to create threshold systems where there is no single bank, so that there is no single point of failure. "Chaum's system provides some properties "perfectly" but they aren't the properties such a system needed to have in order to exist, much less be successful." I think protection against double spending is a pretty fundamental property for a digital cash system to be successful. People would not use Bitcoin if they did not believe that it protects them from double spending. My only real point in all of this is that Bitcoin does not provide that protection according to the standard used by cryptographers; in practice, nobody has pulled off a double spending attack yet, but everyone knows how to do it and it is not impractical by any stretch of the imagination.