David Chaum Unveils ‘Better than Money’, Utilising XX’s cMixx+

In a video posted on November 19th 2023 to YouTube, David talks to David Lin at length about a topic he presented at the Singapore Fintech Festival on November 16th , namely his idea of ‘Better than Money‘, dubbed ‘cCash’ in this video, later described as ‘cMoney’ in a written paper.

The ‘c’ standing for ‘commodities’, David describes the technology as a means to create frictionless transference of money whilst that money remains invested in particular assets (commodities, stocks, indexes, funds etc). One reason to do this he describes as bridging the wealth gap – to disintermediate the payments industry and empower those less well off or in developing nations to hold (potentially fractions of) assets rather than traditional cash which can then be transacted with minimal or zero fees as if they were cash money. He implies that discussions are already happening at a high level with institutions (39:00 in the video) to potentially implement this idea.

cMoney is an extension of the eCash 2.0 model for which David states the prototype was built by IBM for the Bank of International Settlements several months ago (11:14 in the video), which formed Project Tourbillon in a venture with the Swiss National Bank, for recent research into CBDCs.

The privacy for users that is baked into cMoney would inherit those facets of eCash 2.0, and would traverse the mix network cMixx, run by the nodes of the decentralised XX Network. David talks about a specific new feature of eCash that appears relevant also to cMoney – ‘spend lists’, which seems to tie quite neatly into the recently proposed update to cMixx, (cMixx+) whereby the mix network can take a database of codes and constantly remix them, so the issuer of such data would be prevented from having visibility of individuals using the lists to interact with the digital cash/commodity money. The mention of this is at 12:30.

Towards the end of the discussion, David talks about the potential for this technology to be used both in the context of the highly regulated banking environment and, what he describes as ‘more interestingly’, outside of it (43:10 onwards in the video), with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and “What I think of as more interesting ones which I can’t mention explicitly because of regulatory concerns”. Cryptic!

You can watch the video in full below.

You can also watch the full presentation from Singapore that this interview was based on.

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