I missed all the criticism on cashu. What is the case against it or do have don't references?
Discussion
Its trying to get noncustodial upside on a custodial solution. Better to work on noncustodial scaling.
The whole point of bitcoin is no trusted third party.
There is a place for ecash on bitcoin, but it's in cypherpunk utopia where regulators don't care about private money issuance and privacy, until then it's leaving money on a darkmarket, where rugpull incentive just builds. By that point we will have easy/cheap transactions with no ttp.
The best about ecash is payment experience. So running your own private mint on top of you own bitcoin and lightning infrastructure seems pretty seems pretty non-custodial to me. I know this is not the case atm, especially with all the know your mint work, but I hope this is how it turns out.
How is payment experience of convoluted animated qr codes better than just connecting your node to zeus?
What I meant to say was the payment reliability, speed and privacy. Managing lightning channels can be cumbersome at times and especially when your out and about.
If you're running cashu in noncustodial way you still have the channel management pains.
You could get a similar UX natively on lightning if you stack LNURL withdraw codes of various denominations in a cashu wallet instead of proofs from a mint. Now you have a set of bearer instruments that you can give to a vendor even though your offline.
Obviously you need to run the lightning node that issues the withdraw codes yourself if you want it to be non custodial.
That's been discussed a bunch. Lnurlws could be bearer for athe paid api call usecase. It's pretty interesting.
Or even the equivalent bolt12 mechanism. I’ve been advocating for this recently
nostr:nevent1qqsqhfgzprxg7p9ny0za3jz2qd29nf8962j7cw5l5n6egnmzkucrjscudj680
Is there anything in Bolt12 that can allow offline generation of offers, like you can with on bolt11 by setting the payment_secret to a HMAC + ID used to derive a preimage/payment_hash, and possibly payment_metadata that is sent in the onion?
good question nostr:npub179e9tp4yqtqx4myp35283fz64gxuzmr6n3yxnktux5pnd5t03eps0elz4s
I would assume not ?
Yes you can I think actually!
offer_metadata, along with a fake node, and a hint to try via the real node can do this.
🚀
I read the spec and there’s a lot more than I thought, damn
I will be implementing bolt12 payments into my payment server and as a payment method for my services.
yeah and its all in TLV format instead of something custom which is nice
yeah I am implementing this. running a CLN node so it should be easy.
I could probably make in a few hours an offline payments plugin as well but that is for another day.
Now yer cookin’!
LFG đź‘Ź
I knew there had to be a way with lightning. Let me know if/when you want to test anything!
Yep! You create a blinded path via a known node (or, if you want, more than one). You can put as many (fake) hops in those paths as you want.
If there is, this allows immensely more capabilities than Cashu.
No more need to agree on a specific mint, one-side-offline payments just work interoperably.
It could probably be extended anyway to allow that.
Yes exactly. It would be great to have a library that does this, so that people who don't want to run a cashu mint can still have the cashu UX natively on their BOLT12 lightning node.
You can get this same/similar functionality with Lightning. you don’t need a made up token.
It's a big tradeoff to make. You get privacy but you also get custodial, so you have to completely trust the ones running the mint. What if you run the mint with people you completely trust or it's inside a community? On the other hand, people could just join a mint and could end up losing their bitcoin because of scamming of the ones running the mint.
It would be great if we didn't need to run a cashu mint or a mixing service but just with a bitcoin transaction e.g. or another simpler development to come.
The biggest problem isn’t users trusting mints, it’s the other way around, mints trusting users. If you run a mint as intended by Cashu lore you have to accept there will be money launders and other criminals using your mint. Because there is no way to prevent them and no way to know if they are using or have used your mint, so the only sensible default assumption is that they are. Setting the default as they aren’t until proven otherwise is nonsense, since there is no “proven otherwise”. No regulator with a brain is not going to side-eye you.
The only way around this is to use a mint in a way not intended by the lore, for example ID us users at the app level, but then you have to ask why are you using cashu in the first place?
No, in my opinion that is not aan issue. Bitcoin can be used by anyone, even criminals, murderers and backstabbing politicians. If you don't agree, than Bitcoin is probably not for you.
Bitcoin isn’t centralized. Cashu mints are. See the difference in terms of liability?
Nobody can order you to shut down bitcoin. Anyone will requisite power can order you to shut down your cashu mint.