When you were young, mints are those little, round, white lollies that your grandmother would pass to you from the bottom of her handbag, halfway through a sermon in church, on Sundays. 🥹

If/when you receive a helpful explanation or resource, please share it with me. I’ve heard lots of chatter, but have zero knowledge.

Not an expert but here goes.

Suppose you have a wallet - actually a lightning wallet makes this very real - with 2000 sats.

You are going to become a mint by running some software to convert these sats into "ecash" and giving them to people who are going to use your system.

Ecash is some cryptographic magic which packages the sats up into chunks or "notes" of eg 5 sats each - i.e. "minting". These are the equivalent of dollar bills or coins (tho any denomination is possible). Any user can get you to authenticate a note with 100% confidence, so they know it is legit part of the 2000 and represents actual satoshis - but crucially they can do this while staying completely anonymous to you.

This means the sats can be sent around between users, with you validating the transactions, but you cannot know anything about who is sending them to who. The transations system are essentially instant and extremely cheap - because there's no blockchain or distributed network, it's just you.

The trade of iss that its a centralized system, which depends entirely on you not to steal all the funds.

Importantly, from the outside it looks and behaves just like any lighthing wallet. So your users can also send and receive outside of the network and it just looks like a regular lightning payment going through your wallet - all the privacy within your network is preserved.

To me its obvious this is the future of hot wallets and scaling bitcoin. You have to trust the operator (though there are mitigations to this, eg through federations where multiple people have to collude to steal - and most people do this anyway) but beyond that it is essentially perfect money: maximally private, instant and cheap.

It's a place you bang coins in a die set using a press.

I guess you mean this kind https://fedimint.org/docs/GettingStarted/What-is-a-Fedimint 🧡✨I was just kidding around with my other reply. 😂😄