Nostr Web Client

Can someone sell me on why running an ecash mint is better than a vanilla custodial lightning service?

- Each ecash transaction must go through the mint to change hands, so the server can see everything and strongly correlate your payments anyway.

- You have to backup and store your coins or they are forever lost. The mint can backup your state, but that further strengthens the above.

- You have to use an ecash wallet instead of just a vanilla lightning wallet. A custodial wallet can have zero state, while an ecash wallet has to manage a lot of state. An ecash mint also has to bridge lightning payments if other users want to pay in lightning.

The plus side I guess is that the mint doesn't have to worry about strict accounting, while a custodial lightning server does. And there is some privacy benefits, but it's a complex subject and far from anonymous.

Please help me understand the use-case for ecash. I don't care about politics or the regulatory bogeyman, I just want to throw up a custodial wallet service that does its job with minimal friction. I want to have great user experience and ease of deployment (for others to fork my service).

calle 11mo ago

- The mint can't correlate your payments. Check out how blind signatures work.

- Users store a seed phrase which can be used to recover the state, mints do not back up wallet states (would defeat the whole privacy)

- Yes

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Discussion

calle 11mo ago

Check out one of the client libraries, it becomes a lot clearer when you try to build a wallet. It's fairly easy.

cmd 11mo ago

this doesn't really answer anything. where is the state stored? a single server managing all exchanges can't correlate payments? what if most users only send/receive sats from outside the mint?

yes I know how blind signatures work. I don't like sidestepping the traffic correlation issue. even harbor wallet recognizes this.

is it just the privacy and accounting? are there other reasons to use ecash? how seamless is the lightning-ecash convert? or swapping ecash between mints?