2009-04-02, 10:00 PM
Stereo Wrote:In step 3, who decides which to 'unblind' and do they have visible uniqueness identifiers to ensure that Gregory actually opens those ones?
The bank decides which money orders to "unblind", but only Gregory can "unblind" them, unless he told the bank how to.
Ideally, the format of the money orders is under the bank's jurisdiction. If the bank doesn't like how the "unblinded" money orders turned out, they can reject Gregory.
Stereo Wrote:And since it's not stated explicitly, I assume by "checking everything's ok" the bank verifies that each has a unique ID they haven't already got, money values are all the same, and the id pairs all work out to a valid address.
Yes. I'm not sure how the bank would react if they discovered a money order at step 3 that have a matching uniqueness string. I mean, what are they going to do, arrest Gregory? It's most likely a coincidence, and Gregory won't get his money order if there's a matching uniqueness string anyways.
Stereo Wrote:On second thought, Gregory and the merchant just have to collude to fake the identity string half. Even if uniqueness matches, the bank won't know who to punish if it's incorrect.
The merchant wouldn't know in any case whether the identity string stuff is truthful or not unless Gregory showed it all to him at step 1. The bank could try to get the authorities to get the merchant to fess up who he was dealing with though, and all that FBI crap.
But you're not going to get extra money that way.
Russt Wrote:Having never dealt with anything of the like before, I'm going to ask what is probably a stupid question.
"Gregory prepares n amount of money orders for x amount of dollars" - what is n for? Is it just any number?
Yes, n can be any positive number. In Cryptography, the higher the value of n, the more secure the protocol is. Of course, who wants to deal with 10E56 money orders?