Disappointed I am.
If mints centralize, then they will turn into merely more private Coinbases. I had hopes they would turn into fist-reach custody. The Uncle Jim model. Millions of private mints rather than "shill me your mint".
Discussion
Eventually I will spin up my own. Let me actively play around to understand if I need it at all
Things like bitcoinmints.com will solve this hopefully
That's still the vision? What does your disappointment stem from?
I'm trying to push for self-custody, knowing full well that we are not heading for a world where everybody can own a UTXO. Mints feel like a way out of this trap but if we screw this up, we will have just many more custodians that are even less accountable to 99% of their users than what we have today.
It's a giant up-hill battle to explain to billions of users that the details of custody matter and when I see people on social media agreeing on good mints aka good custodians and projects emerge that help advertise good mints before using mints is even remotely common in this niche of the internet, I fear that 99% of users will end up using some five big mints.
In the context of WalletScrutiny I wish I could give Chaumian e-cash wallets some better verdict than "custodial" but it's hard to be justified. Chaumian mints have no proof of liabilities or reserve and even if they had, they could pull the rug at any moment. To justify a different verdict, the incentives would have to somehow break the economies of scale which I have no idea how that could work.
I'm afraid that people will use thousands of mints with all a somewhat good track record but run by some few anonymous "cypherpunks" and "privacy activists" that turn out to have started the mints only to scam everybody in a long con. I had expected to see wallets doing this by now and yes, FTX and others clearly did just that but it's not clear they did plan to go down that route from the onset. With mints, the cost of establishing such custody will be much lower so I guess more will try it.
Agree we want to actively monitor this and avoid it!
More private an independent mints are still way better than a coinbase, and it's hard to centralize as long as running a mint is open source and not too hard. Uncle Jim model will be rare but I can see small businesses or services running a mint that people can use.
It's complicated and normal users do not understand the nuance. For a start, they hear "privacy" and think it's good but don't understand that it's utterly stupid and insane to give a "private", anonymous person that claims to be a "privacy activist" on the internet control over their money, yet that is what many do and defend.
> The people are retarded
