Money Beyond Central Control: Implementing the Ancient Hawaladar Model In Cryptos

Justin Trudeau passed a law at the beginning of this year allowing him to cancel the currency of Canada. Switzerland just cancelled their current paper 8th-series of CHF notes. They are no longer legal tender and Swiss citizens have until until the end of October to either exchange them for new paper notes or lose 100% on their value. This obviously is not yet a conversion to electronic money, but it still requires everyone to declare all their cash to government. The consolidation of money into a single blockchain-based currency is still coming for several countries in order to make all money holdings and money flows (purchases, donations, gifts, and earnings) transparent to and traceable by government.

There are programmers working on new ‘anonymous’ cryptos that are not blockchain-based, not all of which are necessarily being published and and marketed. Some types of non-blockchain-based cryptos use a hashing algo for securing the verification like Blockchain does, and there other ones use graphs. Neither Hashgraph, Ripple, Stellar, nor IOTA use blockchain. IOTA uses a DAG ledger [1] [2]. Hawala is the name of a network of merchants and businessmen that has been operating since the middle ages. It is principally a barter system where money transfers are performed on an honor system and balances are typically settled through merchandise instead of by transferring money. Some Developers working with CEPTR have proposed a model that uses the technology to implement a Hawala-modeled exchange network [3] [4]. As-proposed by them, these networks are not entirely anonymous because the counter-parties need to have trust in one another. But if such trust could be established using only electronic identities (usernames), they could be used as dark markets.