Discussion
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Thatās why I donāt get the hoopla over the ecash. Itās custodialā¦ next
The biggest thing in my eyes is the fact that you can onboard people without needing another app or an account. Literally just send someone ecash over text and they have Bitcoin to spend.
That is pretty cool. Iāll be honest I donāt know much about ecash but the fact that itās custodial makes me feel not too enthusiastic about it.
Do you think it has the potential to be an L2 that can facilitate fast / cheap txās at scale? Despite it being custodial.
Facilitating asynchronous payments is needed, and to the extent that ecash achieves that, and improves privacy, I see benefit. Cashu in particular is built on Lightning, and so in order for payments to as cheap and fast as possible users need to be on the same mint. If I send you a payment and Iām sending from one mint and youāre receiving on a different mint, then there is a regular lightning transaction involved in the transfer from my mint to yours. So there is still a centralizing effect in that itās more efficient to have users on the same mint. But itās perhaps no more centralizing than current custodial lighting providers, which is why my meme above says what it says. For purposes of zaps, itās just custodial lightning with more steps involved.
Thank you for the good explanation.
So what is the main use case for ecash as you see it? People who transact frequently starting a mint for easier value transfer between a trusted group?
Offline/asynchronous payments are a big use case in my opinion. The ecash can serve as a sort of queue or holding place for your incoming payments, where it can then be redeemed for sats and swept to self custody when your Lightning wallet comes online. If enough users all use the same mint for transacting, it may have a centralizing effect but it also increases privacy because the mint operator doesnāt know which tokens belong to whom. Conversely if you only have one or two people using a mint then it seems it would be pretty easy to deduce who the tokens belong to š The big thing is trusting the mint operator, or the federation members if using something like Mutinyās ecash option.
Thank you for explaining things simply. I see what you mean and in the ways you outline seems like ecash offers some upgrades on top of current LN capabilities. Better than the zap locker solution especially if funds can be swept to a self-custodial LNURL as needed or maybe automated on a regular interval.
Really interesting watching all of these incremental improvements over time. When I got to Bitcoin in 2019 Lightning was unusable to me. Itās come a long way and Iām starting to understand ecash as a layer on top of Lightning (am I wrong there?)
Feels like if the LN / ecash development trajectory stays the same itāll all be work seamlessly and be normie friendly soon. Wallet of Satoshi was already thereā¦ but they were custodial and theyāre gone.
I mean kinda but it's also better custodial lightning
*but with privacy added
Disagree. Ecash has better privacy, plus with a federated custodianship thereās less chance of a rug.
Thought it was just me.. Iām all in for private payments but they have to be non-custodial and preferably not build on top a sometimes already flaky L2 solution