Trigger warning
Discussion
No, is not a trigger warning, is a fair warning.
Who feels "affected" means they are the perpetrators.
This has done nothing to convince me a federated model is bad
It's easier to scam some people than it is to convince them they've been scammed
It's easier to scam with one person than it is with 4
Federations are one trusting one person
That's the point
It's all a larp, that's the scam
It's not just one person to sign to move those funds out of the Federation's wallet or to issue new ecash. How is that a larp?
It's one server providing the API, it has several vectors for unilateral rug
These products aren't raising hundreds of millions from large custodians to benefit you, they're scams like every other shitcoin
The API can't sign for guardians, it's just going to relay for the guardian to sign on anything leaving.
They're raising money because this is a valuable tool to have. I think there's people definitely using it the wrong way, with the wrong assumptions, but applying the term scammer is certainly not the term that should be used for the overall idea IMHO.
It's valuable to the operator in scamming the user by making them think the trust is distributed. That is it's usecase.
If you want to claim its useful for scamming the regulator, that's fair, but don't pretend its any better than single party custody to users.
federation is gangbang cuckoldry
You're not wrong, but running lightning comes with risk so people are going to use federated stuff for small amounts.
Custodial* for small amounts yes, federated is just how you know the custodian is either a scammer or not qualified to run reliable infrastructure.
If I understand correctly, the issue is that a client only communicates with one member of the federation, making it all a larp. ie. an invoice is generated by a single fed provider.
I don't know much about the fedimint process but it sounds like you just have to have all of the custodians sign the invoice to attest to it's validity before trusting it? I'm a little surprised if they don't already do something like that though.