I'm new to ecash and lack a lot of understanding. But from what I've read, it seems that privacy is only better when transacting using the mint's token directly.
When using eCash via lightning, it's no better than using a custodial lightning wallet. Am I missing something here?
#ecash #asknostr
# 🔍🇧🇷
The mint still has no idea who is burning that token in order to send it out of the mint, so there is still some additional privacy. Of course, the mint could be logging your IP, so using a VPN is recommended.
Thank you. Yes, a VPN is a best practice nowadays.
With custodial lightning, your activity is private between you and the custodian. There's a relationship where they know of you, maybe your email address and they know your balance and transaction history.
They could use that to determine who to service, and who to ban/block/deny.
With ecash, there are no user accounts, just tokens. When you make a payment via lightning, they know that SOMEONE has 100 sats of ecash that they are liable (as an example), that the 100 sats owner wants to pay a 100 sats Invoice, but they don't know who you are, how many sats you have left, or what you did in the past. They don't even know when the ecash tokens that you are using were issued.
It's harder to marginalise you. But not impossible, eg if you don't use a VPN, or if they refuse to serve known VPN ip addresses, they can choose to restrict people from a certain location.
Thanks for the explanation.
If the majority of your use of ecash is to pay LN invoices from one mint, and your are the only user of that mint, then your anonimity is the same as LN wallet to LN wallet.
If your wallet is custodial, your IP address is leaked to server and if you do not connect to your own node then more privacy is leaking.
If an ecash mint has several users, and several of them funding the mint via LN, when you make a LN payment from the mint (paying ecash to the mint) then your privacy is greater than in the above model of one user in the mint.
That means a mint with a larger user base is beneficial to privacy. On the other hand, I love the idea of having mint's for (medium sized) communities, just in order to have a circular economy.
porque no los dos?
you can connect to as many mints as you want and trust, multi-mint payments have already been implemented and so you can settle LN invoices from multiple different ecash mints
#nuts
