It seems that the problem with ecash is that it requires you to trust a 3rd party like you would a bank, but without any of the insurance or legal protections for your assets that exist with a real bank.
Discussion
it seems that the problem with traditional banking is that it requires you to trust a 3rd party like you would with ecash, but without any of the privacy preserving features like withholding personally identifiable information and transaction history.
being transparent with tradeoffs is pretty important.
Yeah and with all that privacy there's no paper trail when your ecash mint decides to walk off with your sats. 🤷♂️
yes that is the TRADEOFF. cashu isn't a tool for saving its a tool for spending. every dev I've heard that works with this tool has said it is extremely easy to rug, don't put more than you're willing to lose (smol spending cash).
I recall calle was also working on a mint round Robin to constantly move funds between mints to constantly test their "integrity". not sure where that stands now.
but the beauty of tools is you can choose to use or not use them at your own discretion.
So the tradeoff with lightning would be better UX and privacy at the cost of a rug at any time. Lightning can be pretty private self hosted though. And custodial lightning doesn't have a UX problem. So better UX with a tradeoff for insta rugs doesn't seem like a great trade. As bad as the UX is, I'd still rather deal with it than take that tradeoff. I'll accept cash, but I'm waiting for Ark as a payments solutions for myself.
any good video recs on ark? I've listened to a few podcasts, probably tftc or walker. but maybe something a bit more in the weeds?
There's like nothing as far as videos... But there is an SDK in a few languages and it's coming right along. You can check out ark now.
I was down with this, until I realized that I can limit how much I put into the wallet, but other people could also put money into it.
Like, if you use it to get your salary, on the first of the month, and then you pay your bills and move the rest to Lightning, that still leaves the between-time with a bunch of money in there.
I haven't given up on cashu, but I'm taking the problems more seriously now.
Including the very human problem that I'm starting to have too many different wallets and types of wallets.
I'm facing down the near-term, where I need to manage 7 wallets. Cold wallets, hot wallets, LN, ecash...
ah yes this is a good point. also I appreciate your input on nostr in general; always interesting - your project Alexandria too.
I've probably sat here for 10 minutes thinking about the problem you've posed. I should mention I'm not a dev or super smart. but to start i guess your employer is already aware of your salary, and if you're able to take payment in ecash then I suppose you can take it via lightning as well.
why not take it in lightning (ideally self custodial) and move some to an ecash wallet when you're ready to spend it for bills? im not sure how lightning payment hops can be tracked or to what extent it can expose your node to others; but asise from that caveat i think the privacy gain would still be solid. this doesn't change the tradeoffs of cashu ofc and I could definitely be missing something fo sho. cheers
I'm thinking more, take it to LN and also pay the bills from there, and use ecash for your literal cash stuff. Like, buying a coffee or gasoline.
Yes. But I suspect there are already people working on escrow and insurance policies for mints. It will come with time. A bank is still a bank though.