anonymous e-money

see also Encrypting Your Money

AnonymousEmoney is a generic term for DigitalCash that does not trace identity.

Many payment system require either full identity or at least an email address. An anonymous system just would not care.

Some would raise a distinction that any system would really be psuedononymous rather than anonymous, this is probably only true in that the payment settler will have to have some sort of trust built up. Each individual user would not require this (except as desired to convince someone an offline payment was likely to be fullfilled).

Generating new identities as required would allow money transfers with absolutely no previous (and possibly no subsequent) history.

As online settlement would be required for all truely anonymous transactions, the only exposure risk would be a detailed traffic analysis. A suficiently paranoid user could make this very hard even if the settling system was out to identify them.

No fully identified settling system could allow true anonymous users as this would draw law enforcement controls.

Offline transactions can only be done under the threat of exposing identity of double spenders. If identity is never known then only the credit history of that nym can be threatened.

The best anonymity could be achieved by multiple compatible systems that would thrawt any traffic or timing analysis.

This article is based on a public domain infoAnarchy article: Anonymous_Emoney

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