Voucher-Safe: Open Source Online Voucher Payment Project

The software was developed and created by the Pecunix team.

Voucher-Safe is an online mechanism for the secure, anonymous exchange of digital vouchers peer-to-peer between users, implemented as an extension to XMPP (aka Jabber), an instant messaging service. Because the P2P Voucher System is designed to emulate the model of circulating cash in the digital world, it works similarly. The voucher payment system itself is transaction agnostic, just as it is agnostic as to the nature of the backing asset.

This new system is extremely secure and easy to use. Operation of a "safe" begins with a simple software client download and takes about one minute to set up. Multiple safes are possible and anyone may have as many "safes" as they desire. No customer identifying information is ever required or requested to operate this product. All national currency transactions occur through third party independent exchange agents. No funds flow to the Voucher-Safe operator and it is not possible to execute any financial transactions with the operator.

The design of the P2P Voucher Payment System actually anticipates the needs of regulatory authorities, and complies with their stated design goals for implementing "AML" (anti-money laundering) strategies in virtual worlds and online payment systems. Every component of Vouchers-Safe is open source and standards-based.

The payments are P2P, person-to-person or "peer-to-peer" in network parlance. There are no accounts, merely electronic wallets containing digital objects signed and validated by a publisher/mint. Payments are secure: encryption is used everywhere, and all data representing value or transaction details is always stored encrypted and digitally signed so it cannot be tampered with or changed.

Payments are in bearer form, meaning cash-like: anonymous, irrevocable, and untraceable.

Payments are extremely inexpensive. In the demonstration system[12-1-2010], making a payment costs 13 tokens, with the value of a token set at 0.0005 grams of fine gold (approximately US $0.015 per token). Thus sending a payment costs less than twenty cents. Compare sending a Western Union or paying with a credit/debit card. Receiving and validating a payment costs 5 tokens, or about eight cents.

The Issuer holds the stored value and creates vouchers up to but not exceeding the available backing. The Issuer has no knowledge of anything beyond the amounts and serial numbers of the vouchers currently in circulation.

The Issuer: this is the party who stores the assets backing the vouchers. The Issuer is responsible for keeping track of all vouchers in circulation, assigning their serial numbers, and ensuring that the aggregate weight or value of all vouchers does not exceed the backing. The Issuer knows nothing about users or owners, only voucher amounts and serial numbers.

The Voucher Publisher (VP): the VP processes all voucher transactions, signs all vouchers with its private key, and encrypts each with the public key of the owning voucher safe (VS). It also issues signed usage tokens (bought with vouchers) and permits other system components to redeem accumulated tokens for vouchers.

The Publisher also has no idea which voucher safes (wallets) contain which vouchers, except within the context of a particular transaction at the moment it is performed. Once vouchers are minted, their value circulates in the wild, just like with paper money.

This is extremely important for the operational safety of the system operators. Their accountability ends with running an honest warehouse that does not indulge in fractional reserve accounting. They bear no responsibility for the actions of individual voucher users, and can bear none, because it is physically impossible for them to track those actions, even as a national mint cannot. The Issuer and VP together constitute a digital mint. They are not a bank, and they are not a payment system. The open source software and the users are the payment system.

What is a Voucher?

A voucher is an encrypted digital representation which stands for or represents something else. A voucher is said to be "backed" by whatever underlies it, such as gold or silver. Vouchers are digital bearer certificates circulated and validated by a Publisher. A voucher payment system makes it possible for any value located in one place to be spent somewhere quite different. Vouchers are minted based on a quantity of the backing asset lodged with the Issuer/custodian, and the total value of all vouchers circulating cannot exceed the amount in custody. Vouchers expire after six months. This is meant to be a transactional system, not a savings account.

Digital vouchers represent their backing asset, and as such constitute another level of indirection which allows an abstraction of value to circulate, rather than the value itself. This turns out to solve a number of thorny problems with online payment systems generally.

Voucher Operations

Once a client is logged into a Voucher-Safe that customer has access to the contents of the safe and can then perform operations with the vouchers and tokens in its safe. These operations include: Validation, Split, Merge, Payment (to another VS), Token Purchase, and Reclamation (of an outbound payment which was never picked up by its payee before it expired).

A P2P voucher system does not inherently violate accepted principles for preventing money laundering, and would not do so unless an Issuer or Exchange broker failed to implement required AML policies. In which case the responsibility would belong to that party. http://www.voucher-safe.com/