Voting Begins For Canadian Digital Currency App 84
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the voting-on-dollars dept.
from the voting-on-dollars dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Royal Canadian mint has been pursuing the creation of mintchip, a digital currency for Canada, through a publicly held app contest. App development and consideration is now complete, and the public can now vote on which phone or desktop digital payment apps should be endorsed and publicized by the mint. There has been multiple arguments that the mintchip could easily have the same security, privacy, and traceability concerns as current digital payment, rather than actually introducing the benefits of cash."
Re:*facepalm* (Score:5, Informative)
We don't "call our currency loonies". The one dollar coin is nicknamed the loonie because there's a loon on it and it rolls off the tongue better than "one dollar coin".
Mintchip is designed to track you (Score:5, Informative)
it's about time I clear my conscience...
The system keeps track of what funding sources you've been "in contact" with, kinda like Bitcoin's idea of "taint"
The implementation is quite clever, involving some modular arithmetic and the 24-byte "Transaction Authentication Code" detailed in the Mintchip Messages [mintchipchallenge.com] documentation. Or I should say, revealed... of course they're not telling you what the TAC does because they don't want to admit it's true purpose. It's also not just the TAC, all those supposedly random nonces generated by the hardware aren't going to be as random as you'd think. Basically you can use them as an additional way of stenographically hiding data between transactions that goes way beyond what they document.
I can't reveal too many details on how it works as they'd probably figure out who I am, but essentially that's enough bits to encode a probabalistic record of every Sender ID that has transfered funds that ended up in your balance. Then when you resend your balance, you "infect" subsequent Mintchip balances with that record.
I'll give an toy example to prove the point: lets suppose you assigned prime number to every user of the system. If the TAC were simply multiplied by each prime from every payer, you could then factor the resulting large product of primes to determine who the payers were. The actual implementation is more involved, and probabalistic, but you get the idea. Sure it essentially becomes a brute forcing problem, but when you have a rough idea of who might be paying who, brute forcing is a lot easier than you'd think. Canada's population is only a bit over 30 million...
Don't trust closed hardware or software. You have been warned. This may look like a anonymous Bitcoin competitor, but the mint isn't stupid, and they're not going to give back any of the anonymity cash provided that the government wants so badly to get rid of.
Re:*facepalm* (Score:5, Informative)
Considering that Canadians call their currency "loonies", with straight faces, there is no need for apologies . . .
<pedant>
We don't call our currency any such thing. Nothing ever costs a "couple of loonies", it costs a "couple of bucks."
We do, however, call our $1 coin a loonie, based on the picture of the loon it carries. This is much like Americans who often refer to specific denominations by the name of the president pictured on it.
</pedant>