WebWallet - Concepts

• Monetary Theory
• Information Spaces
• Cryptography

Monetary Theory

• Assets & Liabilities
  Most resources are either owned or owed, whether individually or collectively. Owning something gives rights to the owner, whereas owing something creates obligations. Since assets are things owned and liabilities are things owed, they respectively represent rights and obligations of their holders.
• Information about Debts
  Debts are quantified obligations to do something. Money can be viewed as a system that handles information about who owes what to whom, and enables participants to offset or transfer the underlying debts. In this sense, a monetary system is an information system that handles monetary liabilities and enables the transfer of payment obligations.
• Promises to Pay (IOUs)
  One way to generate information about debts is by writing IOUs. An IOU is a signed document that acknowledges a debt, listing information such as the amount owed, the unit of account and the parties involved. Thus, instead of making actual payments in a settlement system, IOUs are a means of making promises to pay in a clearing system.

Information Spaces

An information space is a context in which information resources have location properties and direction relationships between them. On the Web, documents are located by URLs and navigation between them is directed by hyperlinks. In WebWallet, transaction documents are located by their hashes, and navigation between them is determined by the transaction history.

• Existence & Context
  The existence of a transaction document is confined by its clearing domain and the units of account involved.
• Location & Mapping
  The addressability of a transaction is determined by its cryptographic hash and the involved webwallet addresses.
• Direction & Navigation
  Navigation between transactions is possible by following pointers to previous transactions in the clearing graph.

Cryptography

Cryptography is a set of tools for achieving information security properties.

• Integrity
  Data integrity refers to whether a message has been altered. While digital messages cannot be tamper-proof, cryptographic hashes can be used along with digital signatures to make them tamper-evident and easily detect any content modifications.
• Authenticity
  Data authenticity refers to whether a message has been forged. A digital signature is a statement that cryptographically proves that a message was created by a specific party, while ensuring the integrity of the message itself.
• Privacy
  Data privacy is about ensuring that a message is not seen by unauthorized parties. Encryption is used to encode a message so that is unintelligible before being decrypted with the appropriate cryptographic credentials.