[Cryptography] Krugman blockchain currency skepticism

[Benjamin Kreuter]

On Mon, 2018-08-06 at 14:11 +0800, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:
> 
> The downside of Chaumian e-cash is very simple.  You need a single 
> centralized trusted server holding a small number unshared secrets.  

Not true, you can create a threshold scheme if you wanted to do so.

> At 
> two in the morning Mueller kicks down your door and demands you
> alter 
> the behavior of your server in ways that make it profoundly 
> untrustworthy.

As others have asked, what is the problem we want to solve?  The
beginning of this thread was a proposal that the problem is that the
government might target an activist group's finances.  Now it sounds
like you are talking about the government trying to attack the entire
payment system.

No, e-cash is not going to help if the government wants to forbid any
use of the system -- but neither will cryptocurrencies based on proof-
of-whatever.

> A crypto currency needs to be centerless - it needs to able to
> survive 
> the seizure of key servers by a hostile powerful party.

Get back to me when the Internet itself cannot be shut down by the
government.

-- Ben
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