Digicash is strictly worse than bitcoin since must trust central bank
--well, what does "trust" mean? And is trusting a central bank necessarily horrible? And with bitcoin, aren't we trusting somebody? I mean, billions of dollars in bitcoins were recently lost in another epic bitcoin fail, which is presumably because somebody trusted somebody... for example, with bitcoin, aren't you trusting your internet provider to provide? What if your ISP decides "sorry, no more internet access for Adam Goucher." Haven't they just effectively financially largely destroyed you, all by themselves? And aren't you trusting your computer to not have malware on it? As far as I understood Chaum's money schemes (recollections vague) -- if any party disobeyed protocols (including bank) then other parties could prove they'd cheated. Anyhow, it seems to me, in any cryptographic protocol, it ought to have the property that it is polynomial time to use it, and exponential time to break it. If you cannot provide that property, then it was a total failure. Chaum (subject to reasonable conjectures) had that property. Bitcoin, on the contrary, has the property that I can steal your money by simply outcomputing you, and with no need for me to exponentially outcompute you. That in my view is a total fail right there, before we even start the game. And then, the prospect that humanity might actually get into a state where all wealth is based on how fast you can compute, i.e. burn fossil fuels, thus causing humanity to vastly accelerate said burning -- that turns a bad joke into something that is actually extremely evil. Computers are currently a major chunk of world energy use, and if bitcoin is truly the biggest consumer of compute cycles, it is already majorly actively evil.