I wish the crypto currency described in the second half of Applied Cryptography had caught on.
Basically, the bank issues a signed secret coin, and you (recursively) spend the money by using the secret to generate another signed secret. As with onion routing, you can only “look back” one step of the signature chain unless you collude.
It’s anonymous and supports offline spending. Anonymity can be broken via collusion by an unbroken chain of downstream recipients of the money, but that’s a necessary feature to catch double spenders.
It also integrates in well with modern day to day transactions, in that “atm”’s can issue and retire currency at will. There is not blockchain, so it trivially scales linearly, and is not energy intensive.
It could be a reserve currency, but it’s not optimized for that. Instead, think of it as allowing any bank to issue its own digital fiat currency.
In short, it solves most of the problems everyday people wish bitcoin solved, but isn’t very interesting to speculators.
When you double spend, someone eventually cashes the money in at a bank, and the bank notices. With their authorization, their wallet decrypts and divulges the person that gave them the double spent currency to the authorities. This continues recursively until the double spender is discovered.
One problem with this scheme is that you could lose your wallet, then be found to be complicit in double spending years later (when you refuse to / can’t divulge the identity of the upstream spender).
Basically, the bank issues a signed secret coin, and you (recursively) spend the money by using the secret to generate another signed secret. As with onion routing, you can only “look back” one step of the signature chain unless you collude.
It’s anonymous and supports offline spending. Anonymity can be broken via collusion by an unbroken chain of downstream recipients of the money, but that’s a necessary feature to catch double spenders.
It also integrates in well with modern day to day transactions, in that “atm”’s can issue and retire currency at will. There is not blockchain, so it trivially scales linearly, and is not energy intensive.
It could be a reserve currency, but it’s not optimized for that. Instead, think of it as allowing any bank to issue its own digital fiat currency.
In short, it solves most of the problems everyday people wish bitcoin solved, but isn’t very interesting to speculators.