Re: ecash remailer

Sameer and Hal both suggested ecash-laundering methods to provide 
payee anonymity using methods like this:
>Enterprising cypherpunk, Ed sets up the Ecash Remailer.
>Alice pays Bob e$15. Alice is anonymous.
>Bob sends Ed the e$15
>Ed cashes the e$ into his ecash mint account, withdraws e$13.50
>then pays Bob those e$14 .. Bob can now spend those e$ at will.
>	Bob is now anonymous.

As implemented here, Ed is strictly in the money-laundering businesss,
and can expect a visit from the Feds as soon as they can break through
the chain of digital mixes and crypto he uses to operate alt.money.laundry,
or follow the money when _he_ tries to deposit it.  On the other hand,
he could operate a strictly legitimate business, selling financial assets 
such as bearer bonds or low-commission lottery tickets, or converting
funds between different e-banks, or simply offering anonymous bank accounts
with currencies in multiple denominations - Bob can set up an account
with Ed's Eurocurrency Exchange in the name "Public Key nnnnn",
deposit his $15, and withdraw US$14.95 worth of Yen or Deutschmarks or
Kongbucks.

Aside from Bob's need to trust Ed, and his need to trust Alice not to
double-spend (since laundering used bills is much harder than laundering
marked bills) it first looked to me like Ed has a serious risk that he'd
be nabbed by the Feds as soon as he tried to spend the bills, so he has
to trust Bob not to be spending ransom money or pharmaceutical profits.

But as near as I can tell, _any_ merchant has that risk, because there's
no way for Ed to distinguish between cash that Bob withdrew himself
and cash that Bob got from someone else.  Does this mean that anybody
who sells goods to anonymous clients is automatically a money-launderer?
If so, either the bogus money-laundering laws have to go (yay!) 
or laws against selling to anonymous clients will get written (boo!) 
or selective enforcement and entrapment will become increasingly popular, 
leading merchants to refuse to do anonymous business just to defend themselves
against extortionists\\\\\\\\\\\\legitimate needs of law enforcement?
#---
#                                       Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
#---

Responding to several subthreads at once:

Dave M., I get the feeling we're talking about completely different scenarios.
What I had in mind boils down to the case of Alice laundering money through
Ed with payer (and maybe payee) anonymity, then crying "Thief !" and getting
the bank to trace Ed. Without adding anything else, it's her word against his.

Aleph, I think you raise an important objection. After the money has been
through the wash a few (dozen) times, it's hard to tell whence it came. This 
leads into Bill's point:

Bill writes:
> But as near as I can tell, _any_ merchant has that risk, because there's
> no way for Ed to distinguish between cash that Bob withdrew himself
> and cash that Bob got from someone else.  Does this mean that anybody
> who sells goods to anonymous clients is automatically a money-launderer?
> If so, either the bogus money-laundering laws have to go (yay!) 
> or laws against selling to anonymous clients will get written (boo!) 
> or selective enforcement and entrapment will become increasingly popular, 
> leading merchants to refuse to do anonymous business just to defend 
> themselves against extortionists\\\\\\\\\\\\legitimate needs of law 
> enforcement?

Indeed. But really, _everyone_ who accepts cash and disburses money is a
money launderer. When I hand a bored high school student some cash for
lemonade at a supermarket, the market launders my money. I don't have to be
strongly anonymous. Even if they checked my ID before taking my greenbacks, 
they would have no way of knowing whether those were ill-gotten gains or not.
Monetary value just isn't intrinsically good or bad, period.

Don suggests the use of receipts to counter fraudulent theft claims. But how 
are we to arrange receipts for payer-anonymous transactions ?  With paper 
cash, banker Ursula of course need not worry about double spending, so she 
doesn't have to track which bills have been spent. That makes it hard for
Alice to fraudulently (or truthfully !) accuse Louie the Launderer of theft
via this protocol, unless Alice happens to be the Treasury Dept. 

-Futplex <futplex@pseudonym.com>
Please don't cc: me on replies to the list; I get too much mail as it is.