https://hrf.org/latest/hrfs-weekly-financial-freedom-report-98/
Discussion
The “privacy” update here refers to Lightspark no longer publishing all user payments by providing an opt-out api for wallet to their public explorer.
But even after this update Lightspark’s operators still see all payment data. A far cry from the privacy of ecash.
Yes, the trade-off being the custodial trust requirement. If you want maximum privacy (aside from what the mint can see), ecash is an obvious choice for short durations. The issue is that novice users don’t understand what mints are, may not move to self custody, and are more at risk of losing funds if the mint disappears without any notice.
Just stating my personal preference as a user.
As a wallet developer using the graduated SDK I would preconfigure three popular mints in the wallet and preselect one.
The risk of being rugged for the first 20 dollars is there and it needs to be explained in the docs. But this setup would make private bitcoin payments extremely user friendly.
Ecash tokens have mint info encoded in them
Graduated wallets move users to self custody with balance increase. User needs not understand what a mint is.