Unfortunately, Mondex does not publish unbiased reviews about the Swindon pilot. We can imagine that there were also critical voices, but none were published by Mondex. Especially the secrecy of the algorithms does not inspire confidence for this system.
There is a paradox left: On one side, Mondex is completely off-line
capable, but at the same time anonymous. Let's imagine a scenario with
the three characters Alice, Bob and Carol. Alice has possession of a
valid bill X and gives it to Bob in return for some goods. Now both
Alice and Bob buy goods from Carol and both pay with the same bill
X. The question now for Carol and the bank is: Who duplicated the
bill, was it Alice or Bob? Because of anonymity, we can not know.
Maybe Mondex solved this problem described in the above scenario. But
making their implementation secret, we can question the quality of the
information released by Mondex
.
In fact, a British agency in charge of consumer protection has begun a formal investigation of Mondex for allegedly falsely advertising that transactions under its system were anonymous.
In promotional materials, Mondex had claimed that the transactions were ``just like cash.'' In reality, each card used in the system has a 16 digit identifying number which is captured by the merchant and transmitted to the bank each day. The merchants readers can retain up to 500 records at one time. Mondex's Swindon manager admitted in Network Week, a trade publication, that ``we can certainly trace where cards have been used.''
The investigation began after Simon Davies, a Law Fellow at the University of Essex and Director General of Privacy International, filed a complaint.