From my understanding (I understand fedimint better), it’s like the putting gold in a bank and getting cash equivalent. In this case, you put bitcoin in the mint and get e-cash equivalent.
Some correct if I’m wrong please.
Discussion
This is a good explanation. With the added benefit that the bank has no idea who they owe the gold to, and if you pass the bank note to someone else and they redeem it, the bank does not know who was involved
Near total privacy for the eventual exchange of Bitcoin
You do need to trust the mint, but I like the example of Netflix, where you could trade some sats for ecash and then stream the eCash back per minute of video playback, with full privacy, or cash out when you’re done watching to redeem for Bitcoin.
Maybe #[3] has a particular page or resource with more info?
As for why it’s not a shitcoin, there’s no blockchain involved (other than Bitcoin).
You hold the ecash on your device directly (as opposed to keys for a cryptocurrency), more like a torrented song. Then you can send that ecash data to another person, or transact entirely offline.
Xcp, ordinals and stamps are all on the bitcoin blockchain too. That's not a useful metric.
Fair enough. My point is that most shitcoins are colloquially identified as a fiat-ngu-minded, scammy project that rip off the average person, usually by promoting “blockchain tech” and a false sense of decentralization, and the Cashu protocol does neither of these.
Thanks for interacting while I'm still digging around, do you know what, if anything stops the cashu bank from going offline with all the bitcoin they hold?
That’s one of the main criticisms of eCash in general — rugpull.
Fedimint tries to protect against that by using a “community model” with multiple people holding multi sig keys
My understanding is that these services, or Cashu at least, could function similarly to Wallet of Satoshi, except with near-perfect privacy instead of nearly-none
Yea that is basically what I understood