I changed my mind. cashu is bitcoin.
Discussion
potstirrer lmao
Trigger warning
Lightning is a form bitcoin with a different risk profile.
Cashu is a form of lightning with a different finality profile.
How does a user know which mints they can trust? What safeguards are built in to prevent losing funds due to bad actors? These are still unanswered questions in my book.
Once a mint rugs someone they loose all credibilityā¦ and then nobody would want to use that mint anymore. So itās in their best interest not to rug because then nobody would use that lint anymore.
Use it for small amounts only
Like spending cash in your wallet.
You wouldnāt walk around with thousands of dollars in your wallet because you could get robbed
Itās not a savings account
But also you could run your own mint and not have to trust anyone
Or you could diversify across hundreds of mints.
Or your local bitcoin meetup could run a mint and you know those people in real life so if they rugged you . You could r mess up their reputationā¦.
But what if they don't give a shit about reputation? Maybe not the current big ones like minibits, coins etc.
But the future ones. Imagine Shitcoiner setting up cashu mints and after a long time and a certain amount of Bitcoin, people hold on the mints, they rug. Maybe got millions of dollars, enjoying life and setting up new mints.
Like shitcoin ICOs back in 2017 or so but with mints?
Would that be possible?
Exactly.
Hereās a scenario:
Iām a brand new ecash user. I download wallet called Joeās Ecash-O-Rama. Itās really slick and has good UX. I proceed to use it for a few weeks, get a bunch of zaps, onboard some friends and family members onto it. Then one day Joe disappears, his node goes offline, the wallet is unreachable, and everyoneās sats are gone. Now, not only do I feel scammed, but so does everyone I convinced to use it.
SO YOU LIMIT THE MAX SIZE TO BE REPRESENTATIVE TO THE EQUIVALENT OF SOMETHING LIKE 5,000 USD SOMETHING FOR TOTAL MINT SIZEā¦??
Is your CAPS LOCK key broken?
YUP
āYOU LIMITā
Who is āYOUā?
THE MINT
How does the user know what the mintās limits are or if theyāre being honest about it?
I HAVENT SET UP A MINT YET MYSELF - I IMAGINE THERE IS A WAY IF SOMEONE WANTED IT? I MEAN - IT IS JUST CODE SOā¦SET IT UP HOW YOU WANT? nostr:nprofile1qqs9pk20ctv9srrg9vr354p03v0rrgsqkpggh2u45va77zz4mu5p6ccpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0y4rtlf HAS EVERYTHING OPENSOURCED SOā¦YEAā¦I BET THERE IS A WAY?
I wouldnāt be a mint or a custodian for anyone outside my immediate family. I never want that responsibility.
When you click on the mint it gives you all the info like this and shows the limits:
How is that information provided to the user, and can it be faked? I legitimately donāt know enough about how the protocol works.
I AM IN THE SAME BOATā¦NOT SURE HOWā¦BUT AGAINā¦ITS JUST CODE AND WE CAN MAKE IT WHAT WE WANT :)
Is that max amount of one transaction? So I can do a transaction of max 1kk sats but I could do 10x 1kk sats txs and hold 10kk sats on that mint?
Huh ?
On that particular mint the limit is 1 million sats
To deposit or withdraw or spend
No not for on transaction
As many transactions as you wanna do
Thatās just saying you canāt have more than a million sats on there basically
FOR SOME REASON I LOKE MY INITIAL REPLIES ON HERE IN ALL CAPSā¦I SOMETIMES SWITCH TO MORE āREGULARā CASE IN LATER REPLIES OR IN DMS
Iāve got no problem with 100k sats with Minibits
That one is unique because itās a mint and a wallet also
But yea I wouldnāt have a lot of sats with a mint I didnāt trustā¦
I have some mints that I use that havenāt rugged me yet, but Iām willing to risk small amounts of funds to test wallets so other users donāt get rugged.
As a bitcoiner, itās healthy to have trust issues, and this is something that usually has to be learned by touching the stove a few times.
Same with me. And I love cashu, don't get me wrong. But I think I know what I'm doing.
But that anonymity of the mint calls for scammers to abuse it. Spin up a mint. Build up trust and reputation. Rug pull.
Nailed it.
I just donāt want to see people I helped onboard get rekt. Itās a lot of responsibility.
Itās a very valid concern. And I keep getting pissed on for asking legitimate questions.
Itās weird. We went from ādonāt trust, verifyā to āonly use mints you trustā and Iām just asking a basic question about how a new user with no experience would be able to decide which one to trust.
Yep. Iāve been trying to verify and get answers for months. I just get told I donāt do the work, but the reason I have the questions is because I did do the work. š¤·āāļø
And apparently Iām an asshole for that.
I can't answer that guy because I've muted him in my clients but: nobody is pissing at you, you're probably just being annoying and people don't have time or don't want to engage with troll-like behavior. You ask, people answer. You troll or be a dick, people mute.
Nobody has to engage with you, really not hard to understand.
Sorry, but I don't understand what you mean?
Limit the max size?
It does not matter if there is a max size or what else. If there would be a max size for a mint that would just cause that there will be more mints. From the same "scammers".
This is how retarded cashu is. Joe doesnāt have to run a node to run a mint. Cashu is not dependent on Bitcoin in any way. Lightning addresses are the only optional field to add Bitcoin support in any way to a mint. That lightning address can be a custodial or non-custodial. That means someone could run a mint with a wallet of satoshi address. Which means the mint operator themselves can be rugged by the custodial wallet provider they used as a funding source for their mint.
Lol
Yāall are so worried about getting rugged your missing the whole point
Iāve been using ecash for a long time and never lost a single sat
But even if I did get rugged it wouldnāt be enough to even make me upset
My life savings is onchain
And I have lightning channels also
But there are very good use case for ecash yāall are ignorantly missing
Sometimes lightning doesnāt work,
Itās hard onboarding new users to lightning because it comes at a cost to open a channel.
Not everyone will run a node,
Most probably never will lol
If the government shuts down the internet
Or there is a power outage
Or if you just want private small transactions
Itās wayyyy better for a normie to use than something like primal kyc wallet
Or strike to cash app
It gets people away from that kyc trash
But itās retarded
Ok ā
I lost more money running a lightning routing node than with ecash lol
Especially as a beginner opening and closing channels unknowingly
Devs have even replaced nuts lost in the odd bug for helping toĀ point out issues. An very honest bunch of devs with a bunch of honest users is a powerful force.
Facts
I definitely believe that, I think this month I've paid like $50 to Zues LSP fees for constantly opening new channelsšš
As much as I love the cypherpunk goals of ecash, I think most people are more likely to choose a custodial Lightning or layer 2 service from a company theyāve heard of rather than pick a mint out of a hat. It doesnāt mean anyone should give up on the dream, just take it with a dose of reality.
I can run my own mint... For myself.
No one is rigging me but me.
Sounds extra special
In reality you would just be using 2 different lightning address and paying double the fees every time you want to sEnD nUtS š
If you like lightning then go ahead and use it. If you want to use ecash then feel free. You want an onchain trasaction? Well and good. Why the fight man? You re free to use whatever you want according to your needs. SIMPLE!
Someone can download fake sparrow wallet and lose their on-chain funds as well. Real bitcoin doesnāt sound safe either.
Yes, but then your only point of failure is yourself.
Agreed. And the trade offs are clear with Cashu:
-Itās a bank providing private and *offline* transactions.
- mints are easy to setup
- nonetheless, it takes time to build trust for people to join & use a mint of choice
- transactions between mints are facilitated by lightning (helps check fractional practices)
"Use it for small amounts only" - agreed. this is the key
"You wouldnāt walk around with thousands of dollars in your wallet because you could get robbed' - This is *mostly* a true statement; but it's a terrible analogy (which many people use)... unless the threat model is that you're worried about the dollars in your wallet becoming non-transferable regardless of your own actions.
It's called free banking.
Youāre asking the right questions. And for that reason you will get ignored or called bad names. š¤¦āāļø
answered many times. it's ok if you don't like the answers.
Instead of being defensive, can you link one of your replies here for those of us who donāt have a photographic memory of your notes or may have missed it?
iām not defensive, people have answered you.
in short: only use mints you trust.
What a complete non-answer.
donāt get defensive
New users donāt know who or what to trust. Thatās why itās easy to rug them, whether it be in shitcoins or ecash, or scammy custodial wallets. Nobody has ever provided a satisfactory answer to this.
whatās your solution? you never answer
I donāt have one, thatās why I havenāt been comfortable recommending it to new users, based on personal experience randomly losing sats to dead ecash mints.
maybe a custodial wallet like coinos
I donāt recommend Coinos either because of their history of security issues.
ok, let's wait a few years maybe someone will come up with something
Youāre probably being sarcastic but I actually donāt think thatās a bad idea. Itās not like thereās a tidal wave of MoE retail adoption just waiting for the right wallet to show up.
What domain do you trust?
Mints that havenāt rugged me:
minibits.cash
lnvolts.com
21mint.me
Iāve also used lnserver.com, which at one point had a data error that caused me to lose some of my proofs, but they made good on it for me, and I trust them based on their reputation.
So itās not a complete non-answer š³
how many sats are we talking? hundreds, thousands?
A few thousand in all, as far back as Mutiny. I even lost over 1K to a fedimint once.
I lost about 3k sats in the minibits mint
how? the mint is up, did you try to restore from seed?
Yes and I just watched sats disappear doing thatā¦
that must be some bug, if the seed is correct, restore should work without issues. pls try again in cashu.me
Did you try higher intervalls while scanning?
There can be big gaps between unspent proofs (tokens) where no change existed before.
Yep
which wallet were you using this seed with?
Zeus, but itās happened before with other seeds in minibits wallet n mintā¦
How are noobs expected to understand gap limits? I was told restoring a wallet was a foolproof process that works every time.
They never will
You get one chance with people, and if they think theyāve been rugged, they wonāt come back. I still run into people all the time who are convinced Lightning is a scam because they had sats on BlueWallet before April 2023 and they went back to withdraw them and couldnāt, because the node had been taken down.
Absolutely correctā¦
yes, the restore has a gap limit like with Bitcoin on-chain
Q: "How do I know which mints I can trust?"
A: "Only use mints you trust."
Run your own mint
So weāre back to telling noobs to run their own hardware again. Why bother running a mint for yourself, just run a Lightning node.
Will you run a node for Uncle Jim?
lol. no.
Which mint to trust is the same as ātrustingā which Bitcoin hot wallet or hardware to useāassuming youāre a regular pleb who isnāt versed enough to verify open-source code or hardware. Itās a mix of rating, recommendations, and trust built on proof of work.
I really like Minibits and Coinos Mint, and thatās what I recommend.
Calle has this project where it would use donation sats to move money between mints to constantly probe their liquidity.
Yes, Iāve contributed some sats to that project.
I think people are using in the wrong way these public cashu mints.
A good example of using cashu mint is nostr:nprofile1qyt8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnswf5k6ctv9ehx2aqqyzlsj0g0jjs9ntlc97qenlj93yyrc8kvks7r74m99d7e08ta343j6f7elyx.
They created a local community mint and promote it around their merchants and users. That add a good trust level and communication between users. I think this is the main utility for a cashu mint.
If you do not have a local community mint, and you have to use a random public one, then better use these lists and choose wisely:
Use them with small amounts and do not keep everything in just one mint. I hope soon we will have multi-mint spending so will be easier to manage multiple mints.
Don't abuse these mints! I've seen people using them as coinjoin services... that's wrong. Moving around large amounts of sats through mints you are disrupting their liquidity with unnecessary transactions. Behind every mint is a LN node. Not all have a good management of liquidity and you will encounter problems, stuck funds, lost keys etc.
People must understand how mint tokens works, are not just some papers where it says "IOU x sats"... are more than that and are many technical details that cashu devs didn't explained to the end user so well. So do your own research and read how these cashu tokens works.
most cashu users dont have their own community's mint
And that is a wrong approach.
I strongly encourage all knowledgeable bitcoiners to start building these local communities, being a local "LN bank" and "local cashu mint".
I wrote some guides about these aspects:
1. https://darth-coin.github.io/merchants/private-banks-over-ln-en.html
2. https://darth-coin.github.io/wallets/bitcoin-adoption-using-ecash-en.html
Take the example of the nostr:nprofile1qyn8wumn8ghj7mrwwehkcar69e3k7mf0dehhxarjwfjkccte9ahrgwt20f48jarzqy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hj7qpqkj4re75mdnsqrgrtr66a59hz5uetcw4n5ua79a99dfdu6y9y6etqnkvz2a brazilian community
https://www.lnvoltz.xyz/en/brln-academy
BE THE CHANGE IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE CHANGE IN THIS FUCKED UP WORLD
Iām here to change that
Share my project with others and help me make it possible
cashu4community.xyz
With regard to using a random public mint, personally, I wouldn't even bother with multiple mints. The "small amounts" rule is sufficient mitigation in my book.
I recently learned that mints will effectively invalidate tokens that have been dormant for a while, by design, in order to clear out tokens that are presumed abandoned and keep their database of outstanding tokens manageable (or maybe other reasons as well? š¤·āāļø) What constitutes "dormant for a while" may be years, or it may be weeks, or it may be whatever. Presumedly, that policy is up to each individual mint.
For this reason, I think trying to manage "small amounts" of tokens across multiple mints is bound to be more trouble than it's worth.
Dont tell people what to do just because Lightning sucks ass.
fuck off bcasher
Dont have to be a bcasher to realize how much lightning sucks.
Been 3 times to el salvador and saw the disaster. Everyone uses trusted third parties. Wake up you moron.
What disaster happened in El Salvador regarding lightning?
Everybody uses custodial wallets, that means - not your keys, not your coins - you use a trusted third party which holds your coins and sees all your transactions.
This is not Bitcoin, this is a credit card. All advantages of BTC are gone.
This is a new perspective. Iāve never heard anyone say lightning āsucks assā.
Could you explain your reasoning as to why youāve come to this conclusion regarding lightning please?
What is a better solution than lightning?
I personally believe ecash via the Fedimint protocol is an excellent choice. There are tradeoffs to everything. But to say lightning āsucks assā Iād say is a bit obtuse in your criticism.
Lightning may be no good for the implementation youāre looking forā¦thatās logical. But to say it āsucks assā (overall) is a narrow viewpoint.
have you ever used it with a self custodial wallet?
If you donāt know if you can trust the mint, you canāt trust the mint.
Thatās the point.
2 options.
1) Find one you can trust with people you know.
2) start one (then itās self custody bonus) and share with people you trust.
heās a concern troll
Who, me? The guy who crash tests every wallet I can get my hands on with real sats (and sometimes loses them) so I can help other people not lose theirs? Sorry for looking out for new users, but thatās not gonna stop. People ask me questions and I try to find answers.
i don't know what has gotten into calle lately. also the note he quoted of yours is such a non-troll note... you gave a positive review of three mints š
False, Dan is a real one. Heās tests a ton of new wallets and software. Helps run and support or of the largest group of node operators Iāve found, for free. Heās told you where he actually lost Cashu nuts and yet all you can do is still call him a troll wtf?
All I can say is if youāre new here, remember: If you Donāt understand and canāt verify. Donāt trust.
Keep asking for help. Thereās people out there like Dan that can help. Instead of calling you a troll.
no calle. i met him on a sidewalk in nyc and we chatted and he was a good communicator and educator and it was clear as day to me at the time that he cared deeply and was earnestly enthused.
as far as im concerned: if he is not an asset no one is. a lot of time, dedication, and hard work.
I can only give my honest account. People who come to our meetups have practical questions about literally every topic you can imagine, and I try to find answers for them. Itās part of the learning process.
Integrity is everything.
Don't trust, verify.
Making it about me doesnāt fix the inherent problems. Iām sure youād much rather face these questions now when Cashu sill has a tiny user base rather than waiting until there a billion users trying to onboard. And I donāt believe Iāve heard anything about how mint capacity (not to mention trust) scales to meet that level of use.
But thatās the problem with cashu you have to trust it and you canāt verify it
yes, it's custodial
Make mints available to be audited, force them to show proof of reserves or something at leastā¦
weāre open to contributions
i have no idea what we are talking about so i am recusing myself, only hopped on re: daniel, will say using the word "force" in any context is pretty not great tho
Thanks nostr:npub1uc4degsu7erzezp50h4nwkwxgccqql9gmaxe6mmqj70evfldtycs7cwdjc, appreciate the kind words! š„°
Technically it's a bitcoin substitute. Tokens. Warehouse receipts ostensibly backed by full reserves.
this is what nostr:nprofile1qy88wumn8ghj7mn0wvhxcmmv9uqjqamnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3wv45kuatwv3a8wctw0f5kwtnnwpskxef0qqst0mtgkp3du662ztj3l4fgts0purksu5fgek5n4vgmg9gt2hkn9lq7j7xf3 calls it
nostr:nprofile1qqst46ux9ue3swgwckh4e8dkftjamvh0cx5hmd2vv4gx26l69hxq2jcprpmhxw309akk7mnpvshx5c34x5hxxmmd8gurqwpsqyx8wumn8ghj7cnjvghxjmc5vqktv
When you/we messing up their reputation, it's already too late,
when an individual or group rugpull you, they donāt care about the damage they caused, also
the loot (money rugpull) is easy to hide with XMR (Monero altcoin) š¶š¤š¶
