I was under the impression that the ecash tokens created in a fedimint are only able to be spent inside the fedimint. I don't use money inside my family, we use social credits... ex. I change the oil on my grandma's car on Tuesday, she cooks me a nice diner on Sunday.
Discussion
Apparently the ecash tokens can be spent anywhere over Lightning if so configured by the federation.
Is that the case? I conceived it as chuckle cheese tokens... sure I can try to give you a chuckle cheese token at the farmers market, but it is only redeemable at chuckle cheese
You can hear the details in this podcast…
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tftc-a-bitcoin-podcast/id1292381204?i=1000621640199
More info here too…
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/federeated-chaumian-mints-lightning
Sounds like what I was describing. But, why would I want to accept what is basically a receipt for a certain amount of bitcoin when I can just receive the underlying bitcoin itself
It’s your choice. You could receive a fedimint payment to your own federation, to your Lightning node, or you could swap from Lightning to base chain.
Why keep it in a fedimint?
You don’t have to manage a Lightning node.
You get more privacy than just using Lightning.
If you’re nontechnical, then a federation of trusted people can manage your keys for you (and potentially restore your access if you “forget your password”).
Like lightning, it will likely also be cheaper to use a fedimint than to transact on the base chain.
If you don't want to receive federated sats, you just present a regular LN invoice. The LSPs from the federation will accept the Fedi tokens & pay you in sats via lightning.
If you're paying someone in a federation, they present a federated lightning invoice. The LSPs send that user Fedi tokens when you pay the lightning invoice.
If you're a sovereign LN user, you're not impacted at all.
You are convoluting terms... no such thing as *federated satoshis* it is a receipt for a set amount of satoshis from a federation. Of course the problem with federations, side chains, drive chains, space chains, ect. Is always the pegging out back to actual satoshis. You are trusting entities to perform a function on your behalf in a timely manner. The only way that works is inside the same entity... I have zero trust for anyone who is not me. To my eyes the cost of introducing new counterparties and the complexity of fedimints is not worth the miniscule cost savings.