What is the innovation in Cashu's development now that would make a difference and boost its adoption?
Discussion
I have a HUGE problem with mints being custodial. there are people who will never ever see it as more than a toy while this continues to be the case. but I'll be charitable. there is a way to make a cashu mint more trustless by making it behave more like a ZK rollup. you'd need new opcodes though.
Running a mint is already quite easy and will be more in the future.
You'll have a family member or a close friend that will run one.
Because "who will build roads? :)
That doesn't improve privacy, it is quite the contrary when you force to report on the activities. Might as well go full KYC.
These mints are small business that facilitate the usage of anonymous payment coupons. For that goal they do their purpose just great.
Wouldn't use them for my off-grid purposes where internet is only optional but these kind of systems have been used for millennia, we are just watching its digitized version takes place.
it's not a report. it's a zero knowledge proof. the whole point of this method is you do whatever you need to do offchain, then you produce a ZK proof for what you did, then the chain validates the ZK proof. if the proof is invalid, the chain yoinks the money back.
you need a way to physically stop a "mint" or some other L2 payment appliance from stealing anyone's money. it's not enough to set up an attestation system and "catch" the naughty people after they already rugged. it has to be impossible for the mint to rug people. the people who are trying to convince you that we need to sacrifice trustlessness are wrong and you need to stop listening to them.
I don't mean a detailed report. It is reporting the mint activity level which is a dead giveaway of which ones to target first.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a monero fan so this type of proofs are expected but that is on a large blockchain. On a mint this would make it a target.
if you don't want to feel like you are standing on a big red bullseye then maybe you need an actually decentralized protocol that isn't cashu. it's like sheesh we had all the pieces of the puzzle already put together and then people completely forgot about it. cut the crap.
Cashu works as intended: give anonymous coupons to someone else.
It isn't for big sums of money. For that we already have proper anonymous crypto. It isn't to pay coffees and grocery, for that we already have zaps.
This fills a niche in the real world which isn't answered by other options. Even when the mint stops working, you won't see many people upset over it. In fact, the person running the mint is likely someone close to the customers and won't like to keep them unsatisfied for 90% of cases. It isn't perfect, but this is the real world. There are advantages to this loosen method that I think you are under-appreciating but that have a tremendous value to others.
I keep hearing the laundry list of what cashu "isn't for" followed by a ridiculous story about how everyone's mom is going to hold onto their allowance money for them and how that's such an amazing invention. do you even hear yourself right now?
It is a case for keeping it simple.
In either way, if you feel that strongly about a change then it might be a better approach to just implement a prototype and see how others react.
Interesting question.
For me onboarding pre-nostra people is key also for ecash adoption.
I've made the prototype I was talking about last month..
Feedback most welcome. Nothing about ecash YET.
https://github.com/ildella/noa
zapstore://tools.frankie.nostr.noa