I'm mildly nervous about supporting eCash on Alexandria, as I worry that less-informed users will get rugged and think it was our app.
Nobody seems to know that eCash isn't Lightning, and therefore is decoupled from Bitcoin. It's tokens/coupons/IOUs issued by someone with a Lightning node.
We also want to serve people with very little money. What if they earn what is to them quite a few sats, and then watch it just disappear?
Almost everyone starts with a custodial lightning wallet. Just saying.
In the end, ecash is just another payment mechanism that rides on top of bitcoin/lightning. The user won’t actually care other than that they need to trust their service provider. What I am building just looks like another lightning wallet.
The big issue is that there is indeed another layer of trust for ecash and that layer needs to be rock-solid before it goes operational. I am also mitigating the risks on that layer by storing everything on relays that can be independent of the custodial service. I have everything working, but it will be several months, maybe even a year before I have something that I would be comfortable certifying as a service. Once I get to that point, I will be pursuing interested parties that might want to be operators.
let's just not support it in our version at least
running lightning infrastructure when you have more control over the last steps to the destination isn't as bad as dealing with shoddy commercial providers like my recent experiences, though it's more work... the actual servers aren't really expensive though, they mainly just need to stay online with high availability, and the software be configured to tolerate the amount of downtime of connectivity that is expected
We're just offering links to Njump profiles, at the moment, and people can go from there to their favorite daily driver to zap. That's enough for an MVP. We need to come up with some sort of coherent concept.
yeah, something a bit like alby hub, i mean, it's fine, as far as it goes, between itselves so i feel like the idea would be to make a package that includes that, and have a communication system to have them form their own little subnet of the lightning network, so it has less interop problems while being easy to use
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