For those in the back of the room, JB is squirming because he has painted himself into a corner and made an indefensible claim. Or rather he has implied an indefensible claim: that ecash mints do not deserve to be treated with the same safety and security standards that apply across the board to all software projects.
When you base your belief system on dogma instead of principled logic you wind up with logical contradictions and (if you are not intellectually honest) the only recourse is to start denying reality.
We can see this behavior on full display in this thread.
The entire software world has settled on reasonable standards for software vulnerability disclosures. Of course "it's just made up"! Literally every human institution is just made up. This includes money, government, religion, marriage, language, and even software vulnerability disclosure best practices. We made them up for good reasons and we enforce them with vigor by ostracizing people who violate those norms.
JB first advocated for a double standard to be applied to ecash mints. When I pushed him to be explicit on this he retreated to a position claiming that the institution of responsible disclosure is illegitimate.
You see how this works? When a logical contradiction is highlighted dogmatics deny reality to avoid admitting their error and, in the process, making an even more egregious error. They are willing to destroy the very system they claim to be protecting in order to cling to their beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Sound familiar? You are KNOT going to believe who else thinks this way!
Users are not children that need to be protected from their own decisions. Users can and must make informed decisions on the risk tradeoffs of custodial systems.
Denying people the ability to make these decisions does not increase the level of attainable freedom and human prosperity in the world, it contracts it.
Satoshi sacrificed privacy to build a decentralized, trust-minimized system. He didn't do it because he hates privacy, he did it because it was the only way to make the system work. It was the right abstraction.
We can regain our privacy by making the opposite tradeoff on a different layer and enabling people to permissionlessly move value between the layers. This is the right abstraction.
Ecash is here to stay. More people are building on cashu every day because it has the right balance of usability, efficiency, and privacy. I believe we have achieved escape velocity. Y'all are gonna be blown away by the shit coming down the pipeline!
Watch as the haters get increasingly desperate to stop the coming flood of permissionless, frictionless digital cash. They can't stop it. It's too late. The genie is out of the bottle. The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
