I am a self-custody maxi, but at the same time, custodial systems must NEVER fail.
Imagine if every 3 years Fidelity went bust and all people's assets were gone. That would be ridiculous. We have been far too forgiving to our own industry.
Do we really need goverments to force crypto companies to behave?
Or can we get cashu mints to NEVER lose ANYTHING out of just ethics and doing what is right for your users?
Stop playing around and start making resilient systems.
Building on top of broken systems is a clock bomb, ligthning sucks and eCash is a good example of a rugpull tech IMO
it seems everything is 'beta'. hell. even LND is 'beta'. lost your funds? well, it is beta software after all. what did you expect?
we can do better. we MUST do better.
I had this, lost sats in Zeus (LND)
Reach out! Weāll see if we can help.
Beta is just a name tag.
What others call beta microsoft calls windows 98 and ships it to customers. These are all tags that somebody thinks their software should have. It does not really represent anything because different developers do not think of it the same way.
For all i know i cannot trust bitcoin core until v1.0.
exactly! everything is beta now adays. this was my point. EVERYTHING is beta. no one ships complete software. we live in perpetual beta modes, where we ship fast, and ship often. sometimes this works out. other times, it does not.
Unpopular opinion, I want a central bank cashu server with optional denomonation of btc or local fiat.
I am not a self custody maxi - chances of my failure are far greater than that of fidelity ..
That is the reason I love idea of Cashu mints .. give me little cash to put in my back pocket ..take care of the rest for me please ... happy to pay a fees for that as long as you dint loan out all my money to random people :-) like fractional reserve ...
I mean I can set up an #Alby hub .. even do bitcoin mining - technically yes ! .. but I would rather grow potatoes in my back yard :-) ... and write long notes on #nostr - about potato salad !
can they fail after 30 or 100 years? canāt expect the same resilience when stacking counterparty risk factors
There shouldn't be any counterparty risk. Custodial companies should not be lending your money out. They SHOULD just hold it.
If they are just holding it for you, resilience is about good software, backups and an infrastructure that NEVER goes offline, and never misses a single record.
This isn't hard.
the root for the win, not bandaids
I don't understand this post.
I tested 5 cashu wallets. I have lost funds in all of them. Mints have disappeared on me. NIP-60 events have disappeared as well.
It's nothing against cashu, but the operators themselves that need to ship better software and to secure people's sats. We know it is custodial. But that doesn't mean people can just run off with our sats just because they are bored. That's not cool.
My point is that NO one should EVER lose ANY money from a custodial system. Not a single sat. Regardless of how new things are.
> But that doesn't mean people can just run off with our sats
What? It means just that!!
That's why we've been saying "Not your keys not your coins" for 10 years!!
You have to be crazy to put your money on the Raspberry Pi of someone that you don't know...
I don't disagree. But life is about putting your property in somebody else's hands all the time. When you invite people to your house, they are ready to take your property. It's on their hands.
Families do this ALL the time. The family's money is always custodial with somebody. Custody is not only about trust. It's about systems.
Companies do the same. The money is always controlled by one or more employees. Even when so, there are securities in place to avoid misbehavior.
I don't think we will ever get rid of custodial systems.
We will always have custodial systems. Let's build better custodians then!
(I wish we wouldn't, but I bet we will)
nostr:nprofile1qqs9pk20ctv9srrg9vr354p03v0rrgsqkpggh2u45va77zz4mu5p6ccpzemhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejz7qgkwaehxw309a5xjum59ehx7um5wghxcctwvshszrnhwden5te0dehhxtnvdakz7qrxnfk see if you can bake into the Cashu's culture that apps should NEVER lose anyone's money.
I do think that is missing in today's devs.
They are not caring enough to ship bug-free software and establish mints that have procedures in place to be there until everybody takes their money out.
If they open a mint and then just shut the server down because they got bored, their names should be marked forever (and should face lawsuits).
They shouldn't play with money if they do not have the structure for it.
It's really not possible to lose money if the crash is properly derived from a seed phrase Wich all libraries out there can do
I agree with you but this is still largely in the domain of hobbyists and coders. Serious operators have yet to enter this space.
Thanks you for these words, as I think they carry weight coming from you. We need to move beyond the dismissive "not your keys not your coin" commentary, even if it's technically true. If the Bitcoin community does not build robust and reliable custodial systems for normal people, then institutions and the mainstream finance world will..which i think we can all agree would not be a positive outcome.
Really? I agree, none should ever lose money. I wonder, how come I never lose money. If you write down your seed phrase, it's practically impossible, if the mint doesn't go down
I consider the small number of mints I regularly use pretty trustworthy in terms of uptime.
I have seen lots of little things like transactions happening and then disappearing from wallets, relays deleting NIP-60 events and mints just disappearing.
Sure, we can always blame the that user should be doing more before engaging with those players, but I also think the community expects more consistent apps and behaviors from operators.
I can't comment on NIP-60 wallets, I've never build one. But the same goes for them. Seed phrases allow you to restore everything you have in your wallet.
But I take your comments with respect, and I agree. Safety is top priority. I didn't recommend cashu for over a year until we had proper seed phrases..since then I haven't lost a sat.
Where can I look to learn how to implement seed phrase backup? Does cashu-ts make this easy?
I have a question. If Mint A stops operating, can the seed phrase backed up at Mint A be used to restore sats at Mint B?
Trusted third parties are security holes.
It's still pretty early beta and a bit buggy. I have 38k sats that got stuck using cashu.me with minibits mint. "Proofs Pending Error" I was going to reach out to minibits but figured I'd consider it a donation to their project instead. I've been testing the nostr:nprofile1qqstxwlea9ah3u6kjjszu6a7lrnhqkfh8eptp2z6v0e9558tlkkl2rgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsz9mhwden5te0wfjkccte9ec8y6tdv9kzumn9wshszxnhwden5te0wfjkccte9ekkjmnfvf5hguewvdshx6p07xr4s5 wallet and only have had one transaction go missing (using their lightning address feature). The devs are still trying to troubleshoot it. I find the minibits team very responsive. I know it's still early beta so I try testing as many noob scenarios as I can think of. Hopefully I find a big and can replicate it for the team to troubleshoot. I agree sats shouldn't be lost but I don't recommend these projects to newly orange pilled users.
I haven't had custodians rug me but bugs causing loses I have seen. But again this is for testing not ready for primetime in my opinion.
Well looks like the pending proof cleared. nostr:nprofile1qqs9pk20ctv9srrg9vr354p03v0rrgsqkpggh2u45va77zz4mu5p6ccpzemhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejz7qgkwaehxw309a5xjum59ehx7um5wghxcctwvshszrnhwden5te0dehhxtnvdakz7qrxnfk mentioned it might clear a couple weeks ago and so it did. I was able to zero out the wallet. So the only sats lost were 100 I tested on minibits ln address. Guess I'll go donate to both projects the other 38k I recovered.
Funny, I wouldn't have checked that "stuck" cashu wallet if it wasn't for this post from Vitor š¤£š¤£š¤£. And I paid out the recovered funds using both lightning and ecash. But I still stand by my comments that this is still to early for normie users.
I know it's too early for me. I depend on a 3rd party.
I sell on nostr:nprofile1qqs2xugc5jyguqkj36rk0syv4tmnkjdtmtperttl7x9rqjy3ustdcvcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qg6waehxw309aek2mnyd96zumn0wdnxcctjv5hxxmmd9uxa0uz8 , and I have always, minus once, gotten my Sats. The one I didn't, he was not logged into a client when he made payment. Not sure if that had anything to do with it or not.
I have received at least 30 orders thru there though, and nostr:nprofile1qqsdxm5qs0a8kdk6aejxew9nlx074g7cnedrjeggws0sq03p4s9khmqpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpzemhxue69uhksctkv4hzucmpd3mxztnyv4mz747p6g5 uses cashu nostr:nprofile1qqs9pk20ctv9srrg9vr354p03v0rrgsqkpggh2u45va77zz4mu5p6ccpzemhxue69uhk2er9dchxummnw3ezumrpdejz7qgkwaehxw309a5xjum59ehx7um5wghxcctwvshszrnhwden5te0dehhxtnvdakz7qrxnfk , so...
Maybe doing something wrong.
I am not a coder, and you are far superior to me when it comes using a computer. But I am telling you that I have only had One problem ever.
Erm.. people running away with your sats because it's custodial is the essence of being custodial. That's the tradeoff, you're trusting them.
Why people ever thought getting fiat IOUs from online strangers in return for their perfectly good sats is beyond me.
What did you think would happen?
To say nothing of the part where all the sats just sit on a live wallet on a server.. but then again that's the lightning network as well.
> My point is that NO one should EVER lose ANY money from a custodial system. Not a single sat. Regardless of how new things are.
I don't understand what you mean here. Is it "No bugs should cost normies money" or "There should be recourse for people running mints and then just walking away with the funds" or "Nobody should use custodial services as they are inherently bound to lose at least some of them money"?
If the mint loses money, users should be able to sue the mint operator for some of the companies/individuals assets. However, usually mints don't provide any legal terms of use that can define an appropriate relationship between users and operators. Apps should not list any mint that doesn't provide legal protections to the users.
So you want the mint operators in the fiat framework of money transmitters? I think we can do better. For one, I want fist-reach custody. No "Wallet of Satoshi now supports Cashu and they are the good guys so let's all use their mint" but "Who's the closest person to me who can help me custody funds for spending". And to nostr:npub1l2vyh47mk2p0qlsku7hg0vn29faehy9hy34ygaclpn66ukqp3afqutajft's argument that it's "for high-velocity pocket change, not for your savings!" I would say that with fees reaching X per transaction, LN and eCash will be used for anything starting at 20X and that is not pocket change by my estimate. I guess that 10 years from now, on-chain transactions will cost well over $500 making these alternatives necessary for anything under $10k. We will do monthly payroll using eCash.
Yeah, if you are custodial, you have to be legally liable for it.
Every custodial solution requires guarantees. Legal enforcement is one kind of guarantee. If we are to obsolete the government, we need a cryptographic self custody solution for ecash. Without one, it will require compliant companies like Strike to operate a mint. It may be impossible to operate a legitimate Chaumian eCash mint as a money transmitting business under current laws given blind signatures prevents KYC, and mints facilitate transfer of fiduciary media. That leaves us with anonymous mints, under which a rug-pull can happen at any time. This is where a cryptographic bond may be useful, one where an anti-rugpull guarantee can be enforced by loss of an equivalent amount of bitcoin if the token holders can prove the mint is unwilling to redeem tokens.
This post will probably live for a long time. Can you at least say which mints disappeared on you?
I think cashu is still quite young. Many developers jumped on board and eventually lost interest or did not have more time. It's still unpaid work in the end.
The protocol still changes and probably still needs these changes to be better in the future. Maybe there should be more focus on (trying to have) backwards compatibility or easier forward migrations.
Maybe it's not your intention but if i were spending a lot of unpaid time on a project i would not be very happy with people complaining about me sacrificing my time. This does not motivate. Instead we should figure out and come up with ideas and suggestions on how to move forward.
In the end we get to choose if we feel like this is usable or not, unlike Fidelity there are red flags all around the project stating you may lose your funds. Nobody relies on this project nor should you make yourself reliant on it at this stage.
I don't understand this post or what Cashu has to do with Fidelity. Seriously baffled.
1) It's a custodial system. Of course you can lose funds. We're just being honest because we don't need to sell you anything.
2) I'm not aware of any losses due to an "unstable" mint.
3) The number of developers is going up, not down. Where do you get this information from?
4) Cashu has more users than most other projects out there that have excited for years and we don't even have a marketing department.
Well i am making the assumption that this whole thing was made around a developer that recentely said he was not able to keep up with protocol changes and then some people may have lost sats on his mint. I maybe should not have made this assumption but i'm fairly certain that it's about that and maybe some additional events i am not even aware of. I can find the note somewhere still if i search a bit.
About developers going up: i'm sure you are right about that but it does not mean nobody lost interest and maybe left some software in a git repo that may not be fully functional.
I've maybe made to many assumptions as to what this post was about but i read it that we should hold unpaid cashu (and/or other transactional system on top of bitcoin) more responsible for the software they put out there, on which i disagree.
There are so many problems with this thinking I'm only going to address the most fundamental one: the central planning fallacy.
You see it as an absolute necessity to prevent all failures. This is wrong and bad.
It's the same dynamic we see in forest management. For decades the US forest service has had a zero tolerance policy toward wild fires. The results? Disastrous. Forest fires cannot be entirely prevented. They are a force of nature. If you suppress natural fires you enable unnaturally large fires. In 2018 California suffered its deadliest and most destructive wildfire in recorded history. The entire city of Paradise California burned to the ground.
I see parents all the time who coddle their kids too much. They never let them fail. They never utter a harsh word for fear of upsetting their kids feelings. Kids need to fall down and scrape their knees so they learn not to do that. They need to get yelled at when they misbehave so they learn how to behave. What's the result of all this coddling? The world is filling up with risk averse adult-sized children who never learned how to fail. But they learned how to vote. Now we have cops dragging parents to jail for not preventing their 10 year old kids from walking two miles to town. We're trending in the wrong direction.
Same story for banks. The US financial-congressional complex has prevented all bank failures for a generation with ever larger bailouts. As a result, all banking is centralized and the systemic risk has never been higher. Our whole financial system is Paradise, California before the fire. Everyone except the bitcoiners are blissfully ignorant. They don't have an escape plan, or even fire insurance.
In a sane world, banks fail. To think otherwise is to be ignorant of how the world really works.
Ideally market would converge on the most resilient ones. Failure and experimentation will and should always happen on the fringes- but I agree with ānever failā being the development goal
I disagree. Custodial solutions must die.
I knew you would :)
I don't think custodial solutions will die. And that's a problem. If we have to have them, then better make them good.
PS: I am including the family-custodial where family and friends are holding sats for family members AND corporate-custodial where employees are holding keys for the corporation. Both are "custodial".
Itās doomed any time it āshouldā work because of āethicsā. When ethics are both the weakest link and the linchpin itās just getting silly. Trustless. We know this. We need and want trustless in all cases where failure is not an option.
Must I really trust the cashu microcosm where I enter to exchange? If I can get rug-pulled by a system, someone is going to rugpull someone. And, that system set the victim up for the crime if I didnāt make it REALLY evident at the outset. Better yet, make it impossible.
You can't make it impossible. Crime is always a crime. You can make it more difficult, but never impossible.
But, criminals aside, there are plenty of good players trying to make good experiences for users. They are just buying this idea that they don't need to invest in resiliency, security or better systems to manage other people's moneys. Because it this field, people don't do anything when others steal from them.
Software developers have never ever been held accountable for any damage caused by their bugs whatsoever.
Bitcoin changes this quite substantially since it is pure software no more pointing fingers.
Soonā¢ people will go to jail for a null pointer dereference!
Shots fired.
I'm optimistic about cashu, and anticipate concerns being addressed. Seems like it's lurching out of its alpha phase.
Personally, I would never have any sizeable amount of Bitcoin on any exchange longer than the required time to clear the purchase. But the masses will never self-custody. They're too lazy to learn or try to learn. Like it or not, that's the way it is and no amount of "education" will change that for most. So we need reliable custodial solutions for them. The ones who can be taught will eventually learn self-custody. Bitcoin is going mainstream, and people will buy it without understanding any of it. So we have to have reliable custodial solutions for them.
