T-Cash: Transferable Fiat Backed Coins

Abstract: Numerous electronic cash schemes have been proposed over the years - however none have been embraced by financial institutions as an alternative to fiat currency. David Chaum's ecash scheme was the closest to something that mimicked a modern day currency system, with the important property that it provided anonymity for users when purchasing coins from a bank, and subsequently spending them at a merchant premises. However it lacked a crucial element present in current fiat-based systems - the ability to continuously spend or transfer coins. Bitcoin reignited the interest in cryptocurrencies in the last decade but is now seen as more of an asset store as opposed to a financial instrument. One interesting thing that has come out of the Bitcoin system is blockchains and the associated distributed consensus protocols. In this paper we propose a transferable electronic cash scheme using blockchain technology which allows users to continuously reuse coins within the system.