Properties of Payment Systems: General Definition Sketch and Classification (original) (raw)

We present a systematic treatment of the properties of digital payment systems. By properties, we mean that we abstract from internal details and only consider what kind of service the system offers its users, which may be people or other processes. In particular, the integrity properties are meant as a sketch of a general formal definition of payment systems, which can be filled in with moderate difficulty given previous papers; and there is currently no other comprehensive definition (even of only the integrity and at this degree of detail) of payment systems in the literature.