The ability of a system to protect the identity of either the customer or the merchant is an important point of debate between defenders of privacy and law enforcement authorities who want the ability to track the flow of money. The Janus system from Bell Labs, for instance, was developed by Eran Gabber, Phil Gibbons, Yossi Matias and Alain Meyer. It involves reconfiguring Web browsing software to send requests for pages through a proxy that would strip away identifying marks. This would allow people to read information on the Web without leaving a trail that could identify them later. Many of the papers concentrated upon finding ways to minimize the amount of computation necessary to perform the transaction, because this would affect the power of the computers held by the banks and the customers.
More powerful computers cost more, adding to the cost of transactions.
Everyone would like to make the cost low enough to make it easy for people to send amounts as small as a penny without paying a 30-cent transaction fee. One major theme was reducing the overhead by only checking a percentage of the transactions. Stanislaw Jarecki from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Andrew Odlyzko of Bell Labs described a more efficient electronic cash system and described how to measure the tradeoff between loss and increased vigilance. Yacov Yacobi, a scientist from Microsoft, also explored the continuum of control and compared it with the problem of building quality digital stereo systems that must balance the accuracy of the signal with the amount of data needed to represent it. A customer would give each Web site vendor a lottery ticket instead of some other form of payment.