Between custodial lightning and custodial ecash, custodial ecash wins.
The question is can we add custodial services without building incentives to never self-custody anything?
Discussion
yes, a good ux doesnt change that if the amount grows, the risk became too high and we need self custody.
We need better custodial ux AND better non-custodial ux.
In the short term technically inferior solutions may crowd out technically superior solutions. But in the long term, this is almost never the case.
But in this specific case, I am not aware of a technically superior solution that currently exists.
The incentives to self custody already exist (rug pulls, censorship, etc) ecash isn't to scale self custody, it's to make already existing custodians better. I don't think custodians are ever going away, we just want them the be the best and most private experience.
We don't need them to go away, we just need to offer similarly useful self-custody solutions... somehow...
As much as i agree that this would be the ideal outcome nobody seems to have anything remotely close to this. In the mean time we can still embrace the benefits this gives over the existing options.
Ecash is still a step forwards in a lot of ways compared to custodial lightning wallets.
What happened to “community custody” á la Nunchuk wallet?
Nostr should be taking that to the next level. This other stuff is a distraction
I think this is that...?
Just my humble opinion, as things currently stand, I see running an LN node as a (mini) financial service industry, it's just available for anyone who wants to do it (unlike the legacy financial services)
I agree that this works now, but when scaling up you will get to a point where it will become impossible for people to open up a channel because evey channel required an on-chain transaction and we will run out of transaction space way before onboarding every person on the planet.
This is realistically still very far off and maybe lightning is not the end game at all, but ecash does give you some options in terms of further scaling up the lightning network for now.
We have to keep inventing here even if the outcome is not the perfect one.
If it's true about the tx space, then it feels like any L2 will have a similar outcome in the long run.
So maybe LN is already as good as it gets 🙂 and Cashu is the right way forward.
Maybe, but i could see somebody come with an L2 that works different and maybe better than lightning.
In terms of ecash there are already different options out there and the innovation on that front is also still relatively early. There is still a lot in development to decrease trust or make it more verifiable by having proof of reserve on the mint side and building up reputation as a mint.
If there is no solution to go in and out of L2 with less than 2 transactions most people on earth will never get to do anything on-chain in the long run.
does it win? I am running Phoenix and the UX is perfect, while all the Cashu wallets are complete garbage
It's great that the UX works for you. The point here (as i understand it) is not a UX thing but more a privacy thing. A mint knows nothing of its users. It just receives sats from some lightning address, gives tokens for it, then when they get redeemed it sends those sats to some different lightning address.
Phoenix requires you to fill out some personal data (though i heard you could fake it), but it still centralizes a lot around a single service and could therefore easily be targeted and strongarmed by government agencies to give up all data people provided then with.
There can be many ecash mints, there is only one Phoenix.
thank you for your very informed comment, except you got it all wrong, Phoenix doesn't ask for any information
You're right, i somehow confused phoenix with primal.
Yet it is still a custodial wallet like WoS or Blink. They offer superior experiences because for them there's a commercial benefit in it. Also these wallets have been around much longer than any wallet that supports ecash.
In fact phoenix could easily integrate ecash and you could have the best of both worlds.
you have failed to google "Phoenix" again or is this a weird debate technique in which you just say something absurd in order to distract the opponent?
Phoenix is not custodial.
Yes i somehow made the assumption that it did not have a built-in lightning node and drew my conclusions too early based on the fact that i got a lightning wallet too immediately up-on opening the app so i only knew about zeus. I actually learned that and it was indeed obvious from a single search to confirm that. I'm sorry i wasted your time with my assumption.
I will read more into how it works before i make a fool out of myself again. 🥴
