If it comes from your node, it has the exact same privacy as if you sent a regular lightning payment from your node. The lightning transaction is exactly the same.
You have to have other users on your mint to add any kind of privacy. And that only adds privacy as far as the lightning node operator not knowing who sent sats out.
You know you sent sats out of the mint that you run and you're the only user of. That is no benefit.
I can have multiple wallets that interact with my mint, besides there’s no real way for you to know how many users are using my mint
It doesn't matter if you have multiple ecash wallets on a mint if they are all yours. YOU are still the only person sending payments out of the mint. You are getting no privacy benefits over just sending payments out of your lightning node normally.
Ecash mints are intended to not allow the node operator (you) from knowing who is sending sats out. You don't need privacy from yourself.
Your making all these assumptions 1. You don’t know if I’m the mint operator or not and 2. If I pay your lightning invoice with ecash how do you know I paid and not someone else? You don’t ! Its plausible deniability where paying direct from a lightning wallet isn’t
Interesting thread fellas
A receiver on the lightning network doesn't even know what lightning node sent the transaction. As far as a LN receiver is concerned, there is no mint on the senders node. Ecash adds no privacy benefits there.
The LN receiver doesn't know you have a mint. It doesn't know who the user(s) are. MINTS ARE FOR PROVIDING PRIVACY FOR USERS OF THE MINT FROM THE MINT OPERATOR. Not privacy to someone paid over lightning from the mint. Having a mint or not does not change the lightning transaction being sent. It only obfuscates who initiated the txn from the sending node operator.
And back to my original point, anyone using your mint and holding your ecash has an IOU from you for sats that you can choose to not honor. That is the risk of mints. If you are the only person using your mint, on your node, you are doing nothing for your privacy.
You claimed you were your own mint. I'm arguing based on that.
You claimed ecash is 1:1 to sats. It is trivial for a mint operator for that not to be the case.
Let’s backup you joined the conversation with an ecash / ETF analogy. I explained it wasn’t like an ETF because I could run my own mint. Then you moved the goal post and said ecash has no benefits. I explained privacy was a benefit. Then you came up with a hypothetical scenario to try to solidify your point. I provided you with two separate examples/ answers to two separate questions in which you combined into a word salad. It’s ignorant to say ecash has no benefits when it addresses both scalability and privacy.
When did I say ecash has no benefits?
Pretty sure I said many times that it gives users of the mint privacy from the owner of the mint. That is a benefit. It doesn't provide any additional privacy over lightning as far as what the receiver of a lightning transaction knows about the transaction origin.
While you can't hold ETF shares anonymously like holding ecash in a mint, they have the same counterparty risk. The holder of your sats can just take them. At least with an ETF, there are more legal protections if they do.
I don't see that ecash helps with scalability over lightning. Trading ecash tokens with someone on a mint when those tokens may not be backed 1:1 with sats sounds like a horrible scaling solution to me.
