How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash

I have had this paper saved on my computer for a while now, and I have just got around to finishing it today.

How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Cash

Some interesting things to note are as follows:

• The 3 NSA employees who collaborated in penning this paper
• Published in 1996
• A prolific author mentioned in the article, Tatsuaki Okamoto

Mr. Okamoto's name is dangerously close to the pseudonym of Bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto

Additionally I will include an excerpt about hash functions, useful to the studying Computer Scientist:

Secure Hashing.

A hash function is a map from all possible strings of bits of any length to a bit string of fixed length. Such functions often are required to be collision-free: that is, it must be computationally difficult to find two inputs that hash to the same value. If a hash function is both one-way and collision-free, it is said to be a secure hash.

The most common use of secure hash functions is in digital signatures. Messages might come in any size, but a given public-key algorithm requires working in a set of fixed size. Thus one hashes the message and signs the secure hash rather than the message itself. The hash is required to be one-way to prevent signature forgery, that is, constructing a valid-looking signature of a message without using the secret key.' The hash must be collision-free to prevent repudia- tion, or denial of having signed one message by producing another message with the same hash.

This is no surprise to me. It is not uncommon for governments to play a significant role in the creation of new technologies.