As a self-custody maximalist and as I'm worried about incentives in nostr I would argue that the client devs should do this for a profit. Now hear me out ...
If you rotate "trusted" mints, you herd people to trust the one or the other mint and some of them will inevitably pull an FTX. Chaumian Mints are not able to eliminate the quick rug pull problem and trusted parties remain trusted parties that we should try to keep as minimal as possible. I would want fist-reach custody. My family mint etc. And nostr clients approving mints as trusted and websites ranking mints by user trust are only leading to concentration, increasing the stakes for attackers.
Why not have a client and relay tax associated with those predefined mints? Make it a monthly fee. $5/month and you get NoStrudel "purple" automatically even if you don't get zapped $5 ever. Make it 5% of last month's zaps + $5 if funds are available.
* Users can instantly receive zaps
* Users can completely avoid paying by moving their sats to another wallet
* People **will** avoid these fees unless they really want to support the client devs and relay operators this way
* Nobody ends up prescribing a trusted mint
For this to work, the mint would have to ask for the "tax" payment when redeeming tokens received to npub or something but I guess it could be done thanks to zaps to npubs not being as private as Chaumian cash otherwise would be.
Am I right to assume that a payment to npub would only encrypt the token with the npub but otherwise not let the mint know about it being related to an npub? So I could still DM an encrypted token to Alice and she would receive it on the mint without the mint knowing it was to her npub?
I dunno, usually you opt into something and read about the fees first. This means you'd have to show a notice to every new user - which might be confusing.
So you prefer them to get funds to whatever custodian you deem secure? That would not require any disclaimers? "Your funds will be held in mint X. Read their TOS at x.mint/tos. If you want to change that, go to settings." That's the minimum you would have to put in place. The idea that custody on behalf of other people somehow could come without a moral obligation for such a kind of disclosure is wild. And of course, mints would have fees, so it's not unreasonable to also assume they would have some custody fees at some point.
So unless you are a complete psychopath you would want to be transparent to your users what would happen if you ever decided to shut down your mint or simply change the fees. This is TOS you would want to share even if you ran your mint behind TOR anonymously but I see little room for trust in an anonymous setting.
Pirate's "Bitcoin Savings & Trust" got a lot of trust as it worked for so many people but of course it was a Ponzi and took off with loads of BTC. Pirate even was part of the original Bitcoin torch that I can't find anymore. It was more than 10 years ago. Links welcome 🙏 . Anyway, ... I digress ...
The point is that mints will inevitably either be institutions or anonymous and by charging a fee we can nudge people to self- or fist-reach custody. Let's not miss this opportunity to get people out of those giant custodians.
Thread collapsed
Thread collapsed
