End the War on Freedom

I received some Silver Eagles yesterday, ordered from Apmex, for a big premium over spot. I photographed one of them last night under my incandescent desk lamp, and another today in the sunlight outside. I posted the photos at billstclair.com/eagle. Here's my favorite, the reverse side under incandescent light.

I talked for an hour last night with Patrick Chkoreff, the creator of loom.cc. We came up with a scheme for doing secure banking and trading, where both the bank and the customer can prove at all times what the customer's balances are and what outstanding spends he has, and to whom. That's all that either party needs to keep track of.

It uses public key signing on every exchanged message.

Users and banks are identified by the 160-bit fingerprint of their public key ID.

I intend to write a longer article, explaining the notation below, but I wanted to post this, so it's not just on my computer.

Create account: (id_a, public_key_a, random): signature_a
(This requires that somebody has pre-funded account id_a with tokens. Token balances need to be worked into the transactions below)

Sequence request: (id_a, "getsequence", random): signature_a
Sequence response: (id_bank, "sequence", sequence1): signature_bank

Spend order: (id_a, "spendto", id_b, sequence1, type, amount, comment1): signature_a
Balance: (id_bank, "balance", id_a, sequence1, type, balance): signature_bank
Confirm balance: (id_a, "confirmbalance", sequence1, type, balance): signature_a
Outstanding spends: (id_bank, "outstandingspends", id_a, sequence1, [sequences...]): signature_bank
Confirm outstanding spends: (id_a, "confirmoutstandingspends" , sequence1, [sequences...]): signature_a

Cancel Spend: (id_a, "cancelspend", id_b, sequence1, type, amount): signature_a
Balance: ... sequence2 ...
Confirm balance: ... sequence2 ...
Outstanding spends: ... sequence2 ...
Confirm outstanding spends: ... sequence2 ...

Get queue entry: (id_b, "getq", random): signature_b
Receipt: (id_bank, "receipt", (id_a, "sellto", id_b, sequence1, type, amount, comment1): signature_a): signature_bank
Confirm receipt: (id_b, "confirmreceipt", id_a, sequence1, type, amount): signature_b
Balance: (id_bank, "balance", id_b, sequence3, type, balance): signature_bank
Confirm balance: (id_b, "confirmbalance", sequence3, type, balance): signature_b

Get queue entry: (id_a, "getq", random): signature_a
Closed spend: (id_bank, "closedspend", ((id_b, "confirmedreceipt", id_a, sequence1, type, amount): signature_b)): signature_bank
Confirm closed spend: (id_a, "confirmclosedspend", id_b, sequence1, type, amount): signature_a
Outstanding spends: ... sequence4 ...
Confirm outstanding spends: ... sequence4 ...

Deny receipt: (id_b, "denyreceipt", id_a, sequence1, type, amount, comment2): signature_b

Get queue entry: id_a ...
Denied spend: (id_bank, "deniedspend", (id_b, "denyreceipt", id_a, sequence1, type, amount, comment2): signature_b): signature_bank
Confirm denied spend: (id_a, "confirmdeniedspend", id_b, sequence1, type, amount): signature_a
Balance: ... sequence5 ...
Confirm Balance: ... sequence5 ...
Outstanding spends: ... sequence5 ...
Confirm outstanding spends: ... sequence5 ...

Get confirmed balance: (id_a, "getconfirmedbalance", type, random): signature_a
Confirmed balance: (id_bank, "confirmedbalance", (id_a, "confirmbalance", sequence1, type, balance): signature_a): signature_bank

Get confirmed outstanding spends: (id_a, "getconfirmedoutstandingspends", random): signature_a
Confirmed outstanding spends: (id_bank, "confirmedoutstandingspends", (id_a, "confirmoutstandingspends" , sequence1, [sequences...]): signature_a): signature_bank