Ooh, the original Chaum paper!<p>Chaum "coins" behave a lot more like bearer instruments or "free banking" notes; they're IOUs issued by a bank that can be traded.<p>The advantage over a database is that there's some ability to do offline transactions, although the double-spend prevention is done through the originating bank.<p>The advantage over bitcoin is that is uses a tiny fraction of the energy. It's also naturally a "stablecoin", rather than highly volatile.
Side note:<p>"Minting" sounds so much nicer than "mining". Minting evokes connotations of gold and kings and craftsmen doing skilled work. Mining on the other hand is dirty. I associate digging, holes in the ground, mining waste, depths and darkness with that.<p>Maybe crypto [0] currencies would have had it a tiny bit easier to not <i>look like</i> an environmentally bad idea (this is purely about the <i>looks of it</i>, not reality) if they had not picked such a bad word to begin with?<p>[0] Another bad choice of words, imo
Ah yes, the Chaum paper. The "Hey here is a cool thing you could do and solve a billion problems. Oh by the way we've patented the shit out of it and our royalty rates are pretty extreme. Ha ha ha!"<p>I think the last of the patents expire in 2023 which allow for an end to end zero knowledge based local transaction ledger system. That will be useful.
The arrogant ignorance about bitcoin on hacker news is just utterly staggering. So much holier than thou hatred of one of the most significant inventions of the 21st century.