exchange

abstract.tex (3146B)

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 \chapter{Abstract}
 %As our society becomes more and more digitalized, an electronic version of cash
 %becomes inevitable.  The design of payment systems is not just a technological
 %matter, but has far-reaching sociopolitical consequences.
 \begin{samepage}
 We describe the design and implementation of GNU Taler, an electronic payment
 system based on an extension of Chaumian online e-cash with efficient change.
 In addition to anonymity for customers, it provides the novel notion of
 \emph{income transparency}, which guarantees that merchants can reliably
 receive a payment from an untrusted payer only when their income from the
 payment is visible to tax authorities.
 
 Income transparency is achieved by the introduction of a \emph{refresh
 protocol}, which gives anonymous change for a partially spent coin without
 introducing a tax evasion loophole.  In addition to income transparency, the
 refresh protocol can be used to implement Camenisch-style \emph{atomic swaps}, and to
 preserve anonymity in the presence of protocol \emph{aborts} and crash faults with
 data loss by participants.
 
 Furthermore, we show the provable security of our income-transparent anonymous
 e-cash, which, in addition to the usual \emph{anonymity} and
 \emph{unforgeability} properties of e-cash, also formally models
 \emph{conservation} of funds and income transparency.
 
 Our implementation of GNU Taler is usable by non-expert users and integrates
 with the modern Web architecture.  Our payment platform addresses a range of
 practical issues, such as tipping customers, providing refunds, integrating
 with banks and know-your-customer (KYC) checks, as well as Web platform
 security and reliability requirements.  On a single machine, we achieve
 transaction rates that rival those of global, commercial credit card
 processors.  We increase the robustness of the exchange---the component that
 keeps bank money in escrow in exchange for e-cash---by adding an auditor
 component, which verifies the correct operation of the system and allows to
 detect a compromise or misbehavior of the exchange early.
 
 Just like bank accounts have reason to exist besides bank notes, e-cash only
 serves as part of a whole payment system stack.  Distributed ledgers have
 recently gained immense popularity as potential replacement for parts of the
 traditional financial industry.  While cryptocurrencies based on proof-of-work
 such as Bitcoin have yet to scale to be useful as a replacement for established
 payment systems, other more efficient systems based on blockchains with more
 classical consensus algorithms might still have promising applications in the
 financial industry.
 
 We design, implement and analyze the performance of \emph{Byzantine Set Union
 Consensus} (BSC), a Byzantine consensus protocol that agrees on a (super-)set
 of elements at once, instead of sequentially agreeing on the individual
 elements of a set.  While BSC is interesting in itself, it can also be used as
 a building block for permissioned blockchains, where---just like in
 Nakamoto-style consensus---whole blocks of transactions are agreed upon at once,
 increasing the transaction rate.
 \end{samepage}