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ff8b6e10... 2y ago

I’m going to start by saying I assume I’m ignorant, naive, making bad assumptions, or just being dumb. I’m probably wrong and I hope I am.

Can someone explain how the the #fedimint decentralization model is supposed to resist coercion or threats of violence? Because I don’t get it

Apologies if this comes across as a straw man, but my understanding of it is that in the fedimint paradigm:

1. It will only be safe to join a fedimint that’s local (and therefore subject to “Proof of fist” if they try to rug you)

2. It will only be safe to join a fedimint run by people you know personally

3. Fedimints an are envisioned to serve as tools for onboarding and scaling small rural communities, especially in the global south.

Now let’s say there’s a remote town of 500 people, and 5 people run the mint for that town. Everyone in the town who uses the mint (which is almost everyone) knows who those 5 people are and more or less where they live and that they hold the keys for most of the community’s BTC. This is necessary for proof of fist and the threat of social censure in the case of bad behavior.

What stops some warlord or bandit group or dictator from just showing up with AK47s, coercing the names of the mint runners from the first few people they encountered, and then kicking down their doors and demanding the bitcoin at gunpoint? If it were rural America, then the citizens would have the guns to defend themselves, but that isn’t the case in most places. If it was in America, then the citizens would have some confidence that the government wouldn’t use outright violent coercion to discover the names of the mint runners or seize the mint’s bitcoin. There would be some rule of law in place. But again, most people don’t have such assurances or rights.

So that’s my question/ skepticism:

How does fedimint work to protect people’s (that is, a community’s) bitcoin in places where property rights and rule of law are more suggestions than anything else?

I want it to work, I just see it being pretty fragile against violent coercion IF IT’S LOCAL and IF the mint runners are PERSONALLY KNOWN to the mint users.

This is something I’ve heard very little discussion of. I hope there’s a good answer because my understanding is that fedimint was conceptualized by people focused on the global south, so they should have some idea of the challenges faced, but I just don’t understand how a mint is supposed to be resistant to violence when the runners are easily identified and located.

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ff8b6e10... 2y ago

In other words:

How is an unarmed community of #fedimint users supposed to resist armed robbery of the entire community at once when the armed robbers equal or outnumber the mint runners?

It seems like fedimint just creates a slightly more complicated honeypot, but not complicated enough to discourage determined attackers.

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An Capone 🌗 2y ago

I am not all that familiar with Fedimint myself. but wouldn't what you describe apply to pretty much everything? We cannot provide a software solution to a hardware problem.

No matter the money form or technology, an armed band of bringands stronger than a community will always be capable of robbing them of things of value.

One can come up with elaborate schemes like time locks and temporarily prohibiting local access, but as long as you have access to people and you can coerce them to do pretty much anything. There is no money technology, that can fix that.

AFAyiK, it's a separate issue, that needs to be handled separately.

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ff8b6e10... 2y ago

Yes, you’re correct.

Since posting this I’ve realized I was making a bunch of invalid assumptions that I’ll call myself out on when I have a chance

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ff8b6e10... 2y ago

When I originally wrote this, I was making several egregious bad assumptions:

1. “Fedimint has to work for all people in all places at all times or it’s pointless.” This is obviously false, but somehow I fell into this thinking. In particular, I fell into the same trap that the YouTuber “Technology Connections” bemoans about people objecting to installing heat pump heating systems: “Good enough MOST OF THE TIME is GOOD ENOUGH, MOST OF THE TIME.” Lots of people object to heat pumps because there will be 1-5 days out of the winter where a traditional furnace will be needed, completely ignoring the benefits for the rest of the winter. If 40% or even 20% of the global south can onboard and scale with fedimint, that’s an absolute win.

2. I was assuming that resources put into developing fedimint are in a zero sum game with other “scaling to billions” solutions, so I was worried we were collectively betting on the wrong scaling horse. Not only is that not necessarily true, it’s likely to be false because more development and infrastructure build-out in the space is only going to draw more attention from other developers, who will each individually gravitate towards the most compelling projects for them personally. So it all works out.

TLDR

I was worried and cranky about #Fedimint not being the be-all, end all solution to global scaling, but it doesn’t need to be.