Quote from: wheatstone on May 22, 2013, 11:20:14 PM

Quote from: townf on May 09, 2013, 03:28:24 PM

Inert, physical notes offer anonymity, higher adoption rate in the local physical world, instantly verified transactions, and reversibility of transactions.

The masses will have high demand for all these things in their money. These features are mandatory for true adoption, but do not exist in cryptocoins.

Perhaps the lack of response is due in part to the phrasing. I'm honestly not sure what "these features" are, that are supposedly mandatory. Are all 4 features really included? (if so, at least one is a logical fallacy). Additionally, you fail to present any arguments as to why these features are mandatory.

I figured the fact that they are mandatory right now was obvious enough to not go into it too much. Historically, receipts have almost always been issued on reserves, with the receipts being adopted as "money". I think in reality, this will be unavoidable with crypto whether we like it or not.
The bankers will see the light and offer all the benefits of receipts to us, unless we can make a decentral system to do it ourselves first.

Quote from: wheatstone on May 22, 2013, 11:20:14 PM

Anonymity? Physical notes do not offer that, certainly not to the extent one can achieve with bitcoin.

Physical notes, as in cash, are for every practical purpose, totally anonymous. I'm not sure how you can at all say that thay aren't. On the other hand, the forever in its entirety public blockchain/NSA/criminal botnet data mining/ISP traffic analysis/corporate controlled routing/subpoena risk combination is definitely not anonymous. Even if you succeed in being completely anonymous with bitcoin, your anonymity is forever at risk as soon as you transact with somebody who doesn't care or has slipped up.

Quote from: wheatstone on May 22, 2013, 11:20:14 PM

Higher adoption in the local physical world? Logical fallacy / circular logic.

I'm not sure how that's circular or anything but straightforward. We're talking about the masses here, not the techno crowd hoarding bitcoins currently. Not everybody is going to appreciate the mandate for an internet connection and some electronic gizmo to buy every last little cheap thing at the corner store. While it is true that merchants need an internet connection today for credit cards, the customers can get by with an inert piece of plastic, and cash is widely used. Many people do not use credit cards, especially person to person.

Quote from: wheatstone on May 22, 2013, 11:20:14 PM

Reversibility of transactions? False. Credit card services offer asymmetric reversible transactions, but cash or notes do not. If you know who you handed your notes to, you can pretty please ask them for your money back. The exact same thing goes for bitcoin.

This is true. I can give you this one partially, but physically handing over cash is way quicker than waiting for a block or two to be mined. And there is the matter of transaction fees that would have to be paid both ways to a miner for this manual reversal in the blockchain. Furthermore, although i didn't state it in the OP, it should be implicit that there would be banks or "wallets" coming into existence storing accounting entries of these notes, much like checking accounts, and these accounting entries can be reversed asymmetrically. I'm not saying I'm an advocate of this, I'm just saying it can be done, and the masses might mandate this in cases of fraud, non delivery, etc.

Quote from: wheatstone on May 23, 2013, 06:49:16 AM

Why not simply use that internet-connected device to do the transfer itself using Near Field Communication (a lot of (non-Apple) smartphones already have NFC). Just tap your phone to a payment terminal (or someone else's phone) and enter your "pin".

This doesn't solve all the problems that inert receipts on crypto reserve solves, although it does somewhat solve the local, face to face transaction problem somewhat conveniently, except for the gizmo part of it. And at least somebody has to have an internet connection. This is like the smart card wallet on the wiki. I like this a lot, although it doesn't get us all the way there and the demand for inert notes will still exist.

Quote from: tuheeden on May 23, 2013, 11:17:49 PM

YES - I realize the private key would need to be shielded for it to be used for more than one transaction, but the low tech way would be a simple sealed windowed envelope or a better way would be like a scratch off or fold and glue paper. Cassius coins was sealed, so you just need a way to tamper proof the private key while allowing the public key to be verified for the amount.

The casascius coin, windowed envelope thing unfortunately can't work i don't think, because i don't think there is ultimately a way you can get around having to trust the maker of the thing to not know what the priv key is, and hence not spend the coin, like wheatstone pointed out. I don't think you can create a private key and truly prove you don't know what it is. I've tried to think my out of this exact problem for awhile and it's been on a thread or two with no good solutions (that I saw). Maybe with zero knowledge proofs or creative multi sigs or escrowing, but even leveraging all these features, i still don't see how you can achieve it.