Monero will need eCash eventually for micro payments. Monero does give users greater privacy from the mint though. This might be it's biggest advantage over Bitcoin eCash.
Discussion
Ecash is "a fix to custodians", so saying Monero will need ecash is like saying Monero will need custodians, someone to hold other people's keys, maybe Monero will need L2s like Lightning for micro payments like you say but Monero has the ability to scale so that everyone can hold their own keys and create transactions, open channels, so there will never be a need to give away custody
No blockchain scales to micro payments. Lightning needs liquidity, which makes one off micro payments difficult. Although, moneros scalability helps the cost of opening channels.
I think both of you make good points, but there are other L2s that exist besides lightning/ecash, and potential future ones we just aren't aware of yet, that still preserve self-custody that we could use on Monero if necessary
where do you use ecash micropayments? i do not see the usecase yet
Yet
so, where do you see the use case?
Streaming services, but being able to pay per view directly from the creator. News, being able to pay journalists directly per article read. File storage, pay as you go etc.
Subscriptions create monopolies because users have to allocate a chunk of money to a service, limiting their ability to pick and choose. Eventually the service shows content it wants users to see and less of what they want to see.
so you would send your coins to a trusted third party in order to get large string tokens which only work at this one mint in order to pay streaming services by the minute, which have to support the same mint?
I'd put a small amount in, like cash in a wallet. Mints can pay lightning invoice so you only need one mint. Multiple if you want to limit the rug risk. At the end of the day the exposure is about a carton of beer or so. Its not a big deal, but opens up a true free market of content creation.
so, where do you see the use case?
Why will Monero need ecash? Ultimately what any long term viable cryptocurrency needs is the ability to purge all historical data (everything except the set of unspent outputs), but until then, Monero has adaptive block size, so for now everything is fine.
There is always a minimum utxo size. eCash allows fraction of a cent transactions, pay per click. This is necessary to disrupt the subscription monopolies and decentralise online material
Minimum UTXO size is not a very consequential problem if you don't have to store them in perpetuity even when they're spent.
Not sure if I understand correctly, but spent transactions affect the block size in perpetuity. It doesn't solve the number of unspent transactions that need to be included in each transaction, hence data size of each ongoing block.
Yeah but if all you need to keep is the UTXO set, then the blockchain doesn't really grow, it fluctuates on size, and approximates a steady state size over time. It only really grows with the size of the userbase. That's how mimblewimble worked on the original paper. With such a scheme transaction size is not really a factor, the overwhelmomg majority of the blockchain storage requirements is historical data.
Then it becomes a bandwidth problem. These are theoretical problems while crypto has little adoption for day to day transactions
Yes, it does become a bandwidth problem, but that problem is much less restrictive than long term storage of ancient irrelevant data. In the bitcoin block size debate, that was the problem for which it was argued that larger blocks lead to centralization. So it's not theoretical, the issue stemming from perpetual storage of all historical data has real world impacts today, bitcoin had to choose between decentralization and transaction throughput, and ironically choosing decentralization has led to choosing LN which has a network topology such that it trends to centralization. Ecash, an old technology that had problems nakamoto consensus solved, is now being necromanced to side step these problems also.
You have to solve the theoretical problems before adoption, or you find yourself looking for band aids and workarounds hastily when the time comes. Also as we have seen with bitcoin and the internet in general, distributed networks ossify with adoption, so its a race against that to solve them as well. You want to get to the natural limit imposed by your technology before you start employing external add ons to improve it, we aren't there with either bitcoin or Monero.