This is true, but a couple dozen Cashu mints that require no authentication or KYC already exist: https://bitcoinmints.com/?tab=mints
NWC is only used by Alby AFAIK. The only reason to favor Cashu is the current ecosystem that supports instant anonymous wallets.
NWC is easier for connecting your own node and doing self custody. If we are giving up on self custody then sure cashu is better. I am not gonna give though and I am surprised so many bitcoiners on nostr are like this. What happened to not your keys not your coins.
We should be building better self custody tech, not tech that is optimizing for custody.
Pave the way. That's my sentiment 💯.
Its becoming harder on here since there are so many ecash people now its wild
I'm only following peer pressure. Truthfully I think the best solution would be to do away with Lightning and integrate Bitcoin natively. Everyone I've told about this seems to think it's a bad idea. But you know what, I don't want you to zap me 2 cents, I want you to zap me $5, so I think this would actually solve everything.
Bitcoin fees would skyrocket if you tried to put every zap or coffee purchase on it, then those things would become uneconomical and people would stop doing it. You need a system that is noncustodial and isn’t tied to bitcoin fees. This is what lightning is for.
Speaking of Lightning. Fix your node. I wanted to zap this comment 🤣
Here's my controversial opinion. Firstly, Bitcoin Cash was right - their solution would have at least stopped the bleeding temporarily.
Secondly, I send Bitcoin all the time and pay less than $1 in fees, and it confirms within the next block. You can even choose to pay lower fees, and who cares if it's slow, it's a donation.
But if nobody else would support doing it on Nostr, there's no point. Or maybe I should just do it and prove everybody wrong. 🤓
They aren’t right, they just delayed the problem instead of fixing it. Their solution severly harmed decentralization and would have undermined the entire project once you could no longer run nodes on consumer hardware.
You can get a 24TB hard drive off Amazon for less than $500. The blockchain is already nearly 1TB - I had to upgrade the drive in my laptop to use it anyway.
I think delaying the problem would have been good, since Bitcoin still isn't even close to hitting the point of being used as an actual currency. But that is a lost battle.
The point is that Lightning is a premature optimization. If people were using Bitcoin to buy coffee so much it congested the network, then it would be a great problem to have. We would be a great shape in terms of adoption. But people are not even ready for that yet. We're like 20 years in the future, and sometimes I think we have to step back and look at today.
There are so many vectors in which this is wrong.
1. You need to be conservative as possible with changes if you’re trying to create sound money. Moving complexity to second layers makes a lot of sense because modifying core is too risky
2. You would lose all privacy. Having every transaction that can ever happen on an immutable public ledger is just dumb and will eventually fail.
3. Larger blocksizes screws up a lot of networking and mining., and so many other things. It increases IBD and makes it harder to sync with other nodes.
I could go on but this has already been gone over a thousand times
#Bitcoin is currently an optimum balance of transaction cost, security and speed. Making it immutable. Don’t mess with the balance. We do need more nodes however:)
The centralization doesn’t just come from having to purchase more storage space. That’s part of it, sure, but there’s much more to it.
For one thing if the blocks were significantly bigger then it would take much longer to sync then chain and we’d have fewer people willing to wait. Adversarial actors at the ISP level would also be more likely to detect bitcoin traffic and throttle or drop the packets entirely. It also takes more computational resources to verify larger the larger blocks so CPU could become a bottleneck.
Is it scalable to expect everyone on Nostr to self custody lightning or are you assuming many users will use custodial lightning?
almost everyone uses lightning through a custodian. not using it through a custodian creates an unsustainable onchain footprint since every noncustodial lightning user must periodically do L1 transactions to fund and rebalance their own channels. you run into the same exact problem as the L1 for coffee scenario, just a little bit later. lightning should be scrapped in favor of other L2s.
But nobody would. Nobody is going to zap $5 plus on chain fees for a social media post. or I should say very few would.
Maybe all 3 is the way. on chain zap, ln zap, and cashu.
Depending on if you are zapping, buying, sending, using robosata, etc... you could choose which method you want to use.
Almost nobody is using Nostr, and even among the people using Nostr a very small percentage actually send zaps. The reason is because it's too hard. So if you're argument is that nobody will do it, that's already the current situation.
Well, let's look at it a different way.
Zero people zap on xitter, Instagram, threads, reddit, or others. And by zap, I mean send monetary value of any kind besides a like, share, etc... not just Bitcoin.
There were 45k active users yesterday on NOSTR, 11k zaps were sent. many by the same people, but let's say 25% of the actives zapped.
That 2500 more people that sent money for reactions to posts than was sent on all the other platforms combined.
Seems worthwhile to build on to me.
Building Cashu isn't giving up on self custody.
I don't plan to keep large sums of money in my zap wallet. I'll just keep a few bucks there to zap ppl. Not worth the inconvenience of running my own node. Especially when the likelihood of my... (Looks it up) $4.81 being stolen is pretty low.
i tried cashu to see all the hype, and gotta say that as a normie i find it easier to do NWC and connecting my own node and doing self custody.
but i do think the idea of cashu is interesting but i totally agree with about self custody
Isn’t cashu self-custody because it is a bearer asset / wallet?
you’re custodying the IOU/paper bitcoin. I’m talking about bitcoin self custody.
That makes sense.
Thanks for the clarity.
In general I don’t keep more of any non-onchain bitcoin in my apps/wallets than I feel comfortable walking around with in my pocket if I got robbed or lost my fiat wallet.
So I guess it’s less of a concern for me.
What is of concern is why do we need yet another layer (for lack of better word) on Bitcoin / Lightning?
Seems like for large transactions or ones I’m ok with waiting for confirmations, just send onchain.
If speed is important, use Lightning…
It is hybrid in that you hold the bearer cashu token on the device, but the mint LN node must allow the melting of the token to LN sats.
Its so perfect that his node went down while he's arguing against people using ecash wallets for their zaps
I too agree with this 👌 just send bitcoin....E cash we get it u want privacy...get bolt 12 then...or coinos wallet that has it integrated boom privacy no need for cashu.
Agreed, I'm surprised by the push for cashu. Cashu may add nicer onboarding into lightning, but we need better self custody experiences.
Imo we are one leap away from having it. Phoenix connects to a single LSP and is locked to the LSP. If there would be an intuitive way to migrate the channel to another LSP in the case Acinq goes down, then we have a fully self custodial lightning with great experience.
Grifters don’t care about things like self custody, they care about things like ease of use. The easier it is to use, the more people come in, the more people that come in, the more zaps the influencers get for selling their grift. If someone is willing to compromise their principles for ease of use, then you know what their principles are.
Keep getting lightning errors but yes 💯❗️
I meant that sincerely btw not as an endorsement of ecash (though that’s not a DIS either)
This reminded me that I had given up on the last important thing with Minibits for zaps. Nudged me to try nostr:nprofile1qqsyv47lazt9h6ycp2fsw270khje5egjgsrdkrupjg27u796g7f5k0spzemhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejz7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcprdmhxue69uhkummnw3ez6vfwde3x7tnpdenkzmnf9e3k75xqss4 and it is by far the easiest lightning node to setup, and it includes all the goodies for nostr and LNURL. Convenience is no longer an excuse 🫡
Maybe spark.info?
we should do both
This. Why can’t we make custodial lighting by more private AND focus on self custody?
On point!
