Mini-Cash: A Minimalistic Approach to E-Commerce

By introducing a new e-commerce paradigm that of disposable anonymous accounts we are able to reduce storage requirements, while protecting against strong attacks on the system, and keeping computational requirements low. Our proposed scheme reduces storage costs of payers and merchants to the lowest theoretically possible, offers users computational (but not revocable) privacy, and protects against the bank robbery attack. Furthermore, by being practically implementable as a smart card payment scheme, it avoids the threats of viral attacks on users. The scheme allows the notion of “pre-paid” cards by not requiring a link to the identity of the card owner.