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Re: Money as Debt
by
farmer_boy
on 29/11/2010, 23:23:21 UTC
What are your thoughts on digital coin?
I grabbed the "Digital Coin Technology" pdf file.

It looks to me like it fails in the second paragraph:
Quote
This
 Digital
Coin
 serial 
number
 can 
be 
up 
to 
512
 numbers 
long. 

The
 Digital
Coin
 software

 alone 
can 
find,
 read
 and
 alter 
this serial
 number.


If the DigitalCoin software can read the serial number, then so can other software.  It is simply not true that "The DigitalCoin software alone can ..."

Either you have a central server running the DigitalCoin software and you have to trust that the people running that server won't double-spend DigitalCoins.

Or... you have Bitcoin, where the "serial numbers" are the public keys of coin generation transactions.

Let me put it differently: I think the _ideas_ with respect to associating to every product its own self-issued currency have some value. The double spending problem has to be addressed, yes, and that's why I would prefer that people that bring these systems into the world would first take the time to show why they would be secure in the first place. Today it is even possible to show these properties in a way that it is verifiable by software that this holds.

Claims and proofs of the form: P=/NP -> description_of_payment_system -> NoDoubleSpendingPossible description_of_payment_system /\ NoForgeryPossible description_of_payment_system are possible to express in systems like this.