Although privacy and accountability may seem contradictory, the team has found a way to enable this by using advanced cryptography techniques, which they also developed. The proposed approach is analogous to using electronic cash (e-cash) for payment for online services. E-cash systems are designed to be anonymous like real cash, but can also be engineered with mechanisms to inhibit cheating. Here, the currency of e-cash is not monetary value, but levels of trust within a P2P network. The authors explored the economic issues that would be involved in a real deployment in a system like BitTorrent, and evaluated the performance of the system in both simulation and testing of a prototype implementation. The team used computer equipment that is considered basic by today’s standards, and concludes that provably secure, anonymous and scalable P2P systems are within reach.“