One Account for Everything
Your average person has many different kinds of accounts:
- Bank accounts
- Home telephone
- Internet
- Cellular phones (even prepay ones are accounts)
- Utilities
- Online Community Sites
- Electronic Commerce (eg. your Amazon or Ebay account)
Wouldn't it be great if you could have just one account that you yourself would be in control over?
Introducing the NeuClear account
The NeuClear account is an account that you control. You can think of it a bit like an account at an online brokerage account containing many different kinds of stock, except in reality the account is on your own computer.
You can create as many accounts as you want. However you can seperate them by purpose and not by content as you would do right now. For more information on why you would want more than one account see this about Networked Economic Units.
Who assigns me my account number?
As a matter of fact you do. The NeuClear account is identified by something called your Public Key. For an indepth introduction to how this works have a look at this article from Verisign.
Using a free software application NeuClear Personal Trader you create your account, which is technically known as a Key Pair. This consists of a private key, which you must keep secret and protected on your computer. The other part of the key pair, the public key identifies the account publically. If you were to look at a public key it would just be a big incomprehensible list of numbers and letters. Rather than using that big mess, you use what is known as the finger print of the public key. This is a 32 character long list of numbers and letters that are a lot more manageable than the full public key.
Digital Signatures
Much like you might sign a check today. You must sign every single transaction for your account. This ensures that no one will ever be able to transfer money out of your account without your signature. For every transaction and transfer to be valid within NeuClear you must sign it first using the Private Key you created before. This generates another stream of numbers and letters which is the digital signature. It is believed very close to impossible to fake these signatures and certainly many 1000 times more difficult to fake than a hand written signature. Digital Signatures now count as legally binding signatures that are equal to hand written signatures in most parts of the world.
When you sign something (say a payment) with your private key and generate your signature. This signature can be matched using some very advanced mathematics to your public key (account number) and the actual payment that you are signing. What this means is that once you have signed it, no one can change the amount or the payee, nor anything else for that matter without making the signature invalid. Thus we have just eliminated the most common way of doing payment fraud that is in use today. The security of this system is so strong that currently SWIFT the international association of banks that is incharge of all international bank transfers is currently migrating their network to use a similar approach.
Makes fraud difficult
The following shows why almost all payment systems today are targets for serious fraud:
| Credit Card Purchase | Successfull fraud attempt |
|---|---|
| John makes a purchase at justkitty.com for $45 | A criminal group breaks into the computers at justkitty.com and steels John's credit card number from their database. They use this to make a fake purchase using John's card. There is no digital signature so it is easy to create faudulent payments. |
Digital Signatures means that it is very difficult for a group of criminals to create fraudulent payments from your account:
| NeuClear Purchase | Unsuccessfull fraud attempt |
|---|---|
| John makes a purchase at justkitty.com for $45 by using VERAX Pay with NeuClear | A criminal group breaks into the computers at justkitty.com and steels John's NeuClear account number and the receipt of his last purchase from their database. They use this to attempt a fraudulent purchase. Fortunately if even one letter is changed from the original message the signature is invalid and VERAX Pay rejects it as a fraud. |
I don't own my own computer. How do I create my own account.
In the next couple of months various companies will be rolling out services to allow you to create accounts on their servers. Some of these will be relatively low security, but easy to use. Some of them will provide you with almost all the same benefits as running the software on your own computer. You will be able to pick and choose a way of maintaining your account to suit your situation and paranoia. Within the next year we will be creating a Smart Card option, which allows you to access your NeuClear accounts wherever you are with very high levels of security.
What about Privacy?
While you know it would be convenient to keep all the information in one account, doesn't that mean that people can find out everything about me because I only have one account? Theoretically yes. However you can easily create multiple accounts for various purposes. You might want to create more than one for business purposes (see Networked Economic Units, but you might also want to maintain different accounts for various other purposes.
Let's say you are a 35 year old male and just happen to be a big Hello Kitty fan. More than likely you wouldn't want your friends nor business associates know about your secret passion. You could create your own "Hello Kitty Account". This would allow you to transfer funds into this from your normal account and you can purchase Hello Kitty memorabilia on the internet to your hearts content without anyone finding out about it. (You of course still have to keep the doors locked to your hobby room in your house).