Mitigating the inherent untrustworthiness of unknown cashu mints is something that must be addressed openly before it can be considered a good solution for zaps on #nostr
Discussion
LN is pretty private as is for most people, just use Monero if you need something absolutely private meanwhile IMO.
yes, non-custodial LN privacy is pretty good. custodial is as bad as it gets though. ecash has other properties that make it particularly fit for nostr, such as being able to pay offline (no communication with the mint) and the fact that it's a bearer asset (the data is the money).
don’t you need to check with the mint to know its valid? how does offline work.
I guess the faster who remints the tokens wins? Or you lock it pk if offline?
sending is just taking the proofs from your DB and sending it. you probably mean receiving? when receiving you can check the dleq proof to see if the signature is valid. if it isn't locked to your pubkey, you must talk to the mint to prevent double spending.
This is something I was thinking about the other day when you talked about million TPS. Presumably, an end user won't want to lock a bunch of funds to a service provider with no option to reclaim unused ones.
Do you have thoughts on that? I suppose a timelocked alternate spending path would work, but that becomes troublesome if you have a bunch of timelocked tokens on the verge of expiration, too.
with p2pk you can add a timelock to reclaim it if you end up not spending it.
What do/should be done when you have p2pks very near to expiring? It seems like you just end up reverting to the "worst case" of the recipient needing to immediately redeem tokens and/or senders needing to redeem them into new p2pks them before sending, which ends up putting load on the mint.
I suppose if users had the timelocks semi-randomly distributed, then only a subset of tokens would need to be urgently redeemed?
If you run a lightning node non-custodial is pretty good. If you use phoenix or similar LSP type setup the privacy is not very good.
I'm interested in this. do you have any ideas?
The most obvious idea to me would be to have mints from existing trusted custodians like Alby. That doesn’t do anything to decentralize things more than they already are, but those entities have proven themselves so far to be reliable services and not rug their users, and I believe that Cashu would offer their users some additional benefits over what they already offer.
New custodians are simply going to be untrustworthy until they prove otherwise. Or at least they should be, and I wouldn’t want to leave any sats on a custodian I know nothing about.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to use more than one or two primary mints/custodians for my balances, and I would want to be able to immediately swap any received payments either to my mints or perhaps even just directly to my lightning address/node.
Something, something web of trust, innit?