Re: [Taler] Support for payer-trustlessness and merchant-auditing

[Sree Harsha Totakura]

On 10/03/2017 08:49 PM, Rune K. Svendsen wrote:
> So the customer would start out by sending e.g. 100 EUR-equivalent of
> bitcoins to a 2-of-2 multi-signature address, where one key is owned by
> the customer and the second key by the exchange. When the customer is
> ready to pay a merchant, the customer transfers exactly the amount it
> wishes to pay the merchant to the exchange, who then responds with a
> token of that value that the customer can use to pay the merchant.
> 
> Have you considered a simpler design, where no blind signatures are
> used, but the customer simply connects to the exchange via Tor, in order
> to conceal its IP-address (in case it wants to maintain privacy)? In
> this way, the only information the exchange gains is the ability to
> group transactions by customer -- it learns nothing about the customer
> itself except a source Bitcoin address (from which funds are sent to the
> customer/exchange multi-sig address).

What benefit does this provide when compared to the customer doing a
blockchain transaction directly to the merchant?  I don't see why an
exchange is needed here.

Regards,
Sree