On Wed, 29 Jan 2003, Michael Cardenas wrote:
> A far mroe exciting idea to me is how handhelds like palms, ipaqs,
> etc, could beused to transfer digital anonymous cash. They seem like
> perfect delivery vehicles.
>
> Say, secret agent X meets congressman Y in a dark alley somewhere to
> give him a lobbying donation of a million bucks, wouldn't it be great
> if X could just take out his handheld, point it at Y's handheld, tap a
> button on screen and transfer that million anonymously and securely?
> That would be much better than having to lug around a heavy briefcase
> full of hundred or thousand dollar bills!
>
> Does anyone think this is feasilbe? How could this be done?
Yes, it is feasible. What you'd be passing would be access credentials
today (ie keys, hashes, passphrases, biometrics, etc.). Eventually what
you need is a common mechanism to send a digital certificate from the bank
to the withdrawing customer that is legally recognized (the technology is
probably the easy part) to represent a certain quantity of 'value' in
'dollars'. And then another agency could then manipulate that in various
'certified' ways to widthdraw, transfer, or deposit. Note that this
'independent agent' process requires nearly air-tight DRM. What it really
implies is 'third party'. But more to the point, the real trick is to
blind the transfer of the certificates to the banks (eg a middle man
account), that's not something the banks are going to want to see. A bank
is not likely to transfer to another institution without the correct
credentials. So you need to find a 'natural' break in the paper-trail.
Such breaks are not likely to be legal (for long).
> As handhelds become more ubiquitous, it seems that they have an
> exciting potential for making digital cash a real possibility. This
> method would also circumvent lots of attacks on digital cash that
> could be made when using it over an open transmission line.
What happens when that PDA you have in your hand is a portal into a global
scale distributed super-computer?
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