Self-sovereign stablecoins are interesting and probably here to stay; however, they face numerous regulatory hurdles from banking, financial tracking, and securities laws. For stablecoins backed by a governmental currency, the ultimate expression would be a CBDC. Since paper currency has been in steady decline (and disproportionately for legitimate transactions), a CBDC could reintroduce cash with technological advantages and efficient settlement while minimizing user fees.

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A one-time program (OTP) works as follows: Alice provides Bob with the implementation of some function. Bob can have the function evaluated exclusively on a single input of his choosing. Once executed, the program will fail to evaluate on any other input. State-of-the-art one-time programs have remained theoretical, requiring custom hardware that is cost-ineffective/unavailable, or confined to adhoc/unrealistic assumptions. To bridge this gap, we explore how the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) of modern CPUs can realize the OTP functionality. Specifically, we build two flavours of such a system: in the first, the TEE directly enforces the one-timeness of the program; in the second, the program is represented with a garbled circuit and the TEE ensures Bob's input can only be wired into the circuit once, equivalent to a smaller cryptographic primitive called one-time memory. These have different performance profiles: the first is best when Alice's input is small and Bob's is large, and the second for the converse. 5 Hazay and Lindell [24] give a thorough treatment of interactive two-party protocols. 6 Further explanation is provided in Appendix A.2. arXiv:1907.00935v1 [cs.CR] 1 Jul 2019 7 As an example, Intel STK2mv64CC, a Compute Stick that supports both TXT and TPM, was priced at $499.95 USD on Amazon.com (as of September 2018). 8 A state-bound cryptographic operation performed by the TPM chip, like encryption.

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Cryptography meets monetary policy.