Could Tiny Somaliland Become the First Cashless Society?

It's called a fire suit. And one could certainly devise a method to allow for anonymous digital transactions via public-private key cryptography and Tor-like network routing.

One possible implementation would require a central transaction entity (CTE). The buyer's bank would send the digital money and a one-time public key to the CTE via a TOR-like network. The CTE would then reply with a unique identifier (encrypted using that public key), to be relayed to the buyer (some personal device). This unique identifier is what would then be encrypted with the seller's public key. The seller's bank would then receive the money from the CTE by using that same unique identifier.

What does this mean?

  1. The buyer's bank does not know where it sent the money.
  2. The CTE knows only that a transaction occurred between two banks.
  3. The seller's bank does not know where it received the money from.