Nostr Web Client

the biggest privacy and efficiency benefits of ecash come when you transact fully within the ecash system. you lose privacy and pay fees when you go to another layer, whether it's lightning or on-chain or something else

how does it work in practice?

mints will hold balances of other mint's ecash and settle up with each other at regular intervals via lightning. this is exactly how free banks operated in the 1800s before the state shut them all down

user wallets can do the same thing. when one ecash user wants to pay another their wallets will collaborate in a privacy preserving way to find a common mint they both trust. if no common mint is found, then fall back to lightning and pay the lightning fee

seriously, every bitcoiner should read up on free banking. these are not new problems. they've already been solved. we just need to rebuild those solutions in a new technical medium

Tim Bouma 5mo ago

Yup. I built it, but it works a bit differently. Mints don’t know or care about other mints. Users have in their wallet ecash from different mints - they decide what to do. If they don’t trust a mint, they just swap from one mint to another, settled via lightning invoices. The mints don’t have a clue what’s going, except their own issuance and redemption.

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Discussion

the axiom 5mo ago

that's how every cashu wallet works

Tim Bouma 5mo ago

Yup, and it’s beautiful.

the axiom 5mo ago

yes, but it doesn't address the problem of having to use lightning all the time

Tim Bouma 5mo ago

I don’t use Lightning between safebox addresses. It bypasses lightning altogether.

stax 5mo ago

I was playing with safebox and fumbled 200 nuts somewhere, poof they've gone into the nut heaven 🥷at least with cashu me, you can find the token in history and send back to yourself.

Calle has designed cashu me excellently the ux is top tier