Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Anonymity
by
fellowtraveler
on 26/12/2010, 23:24:07 UTC
Are you saying that market will develop with OpenTransactions whereby people use bandwidth/cpu resources as currency?But basically OpenTransactions isn't backed by anything?  It is just that they will allow people to anonymously trade, and will thus produce a commodity of bandwidth/cpu resources?  (I'm not terribly familiar with OpenTransactions)

Open Transactions is software that allows anyone to connect and issue currencies (just like Loom, if you're familiar with that) and then transact in them untraceably.  So there could be a bitcoin-backed currency, an e-gold-backed currency, a goldmoney-backed currency, a fiat-backed currency, and a hundred others.

My point above was that using untraceable money, it becomes possible to pay for resources on anonymous networks, which would therefore solve issues of resource allocation on anonymous networks.  And since the digital cash, in that case, is being used to pay for resources on anonymous networks, that means it could also be redeemed for those resources as well. Thus, a digital cash backed in Bitcoin would have value beyond just the "proof of work" that went into creating the Bitcoins, but would also have the value of paying for filesharing resources on anonymous networks.

In fact, the three pieces fix each other's weaknesses...

Bitcoin is fully-distributed but not untraceable.
Open Transactions is untraceable but requires a server.
Anonymous networks allow you to run a server but they run too slowly...
Open Transactions would solve issues of resource allocation on those networks, but requires an issuer somewhere to store the gold...
Unless you back it with Bitcoin, in which case there is no backing storage needed since that becomes fully-distributed.