Supposedly not secure from agencies

Why can't ecash be for payments? I personally wouldn't want large amounts of long-lived amounts stored in a fedimint. The former reducing overall rug risk and the latter reduces the chance of inflationary practices (aside from running a client that validates the version of fedimint run by guardians).

Fedimint doesn't explicitly have to be a "bank", although, admittedly, that's been a advertised use case from louder voices than mine own.

Laying out an example:

I'm visiting LA. I somewhat know people in the area, maybe I'm visiting them. There's a smaller network of merchants that participate in a fedimint. Similar to handling cash, they don't keep large amounts in the drawer (in the fedimint). Just enough to do business of the day. When i arrive, I can peg-in (on-chain or with LN) to the fedimint and now have ecash to spend. Each merchant and myself don't have to mange LN nodes and the complexity inherent to it.

Another:

Remove the ecash/BTC/LN modules and insert a password manger or any other arbitrary data. Since the data is validated via consensus among fedimint nodes, the risk and access is distributed. It enables the syncing and validity across disaggregate nodes.

I personally would love to auto-sync my bitwarden instance between home and office servers. I understand there are solutions to that with some automation, but fedimint could offer this out of the box for the less technically inclined.

Myriad of solutions and fedimint could be one. Definitely not the end all be all, but i have to pick something to focus on with my limited time. 🫠

What amount of BTC do you consider payments?

In third world countries what you use for payments could be someones life savings?

I am.

But I thought Hawala was for payments. Not a bank like fedimint. More akin to lightning.

It makes sense to me that having friends or family as intermediaries for a short duration could work since afterwards the relationship goes back to being unencumbered with financial concerns.

1. And now most of the world trusts banks with their "money" (currency really). I don't think this paradigm will go away and making people comfortable with the personal responsibility of holding all of your wealth yourself will take a long time. In the meantime, custodians are going to exist. Giving people a privacy preserving trade off for a custodian seems a good way to move toward a better future, while we educate the masses on self-custody and personal responsibility.

2. Agree with all of this. Trade offs always. There is going to be complexity with any technology until there's not. It used to be super complex and require lots of people to run mainframes, and now we have super computer in our pockets. The more time passed, the more abstracted away from electrons on a motherboard we get. Even 10 years ago, managing a single bitcoin wallet was a super technical task, but today I can download an app to my phone and hold the keys to some coin.

3. I get your point here and don't disagree. This is why I dedicate my free time to working on a solution that I think will help adoption of bitcoin. The "coin" with the best tools will capture more economic share. I hope you're building your ideal future as well. (Personally, I think ETH will be what they build the CBDCs on. All the code and infrastructure is there for the State to scoop up.)

likewise, thanks to you for the reply.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, I'll respond to each paragraph:

1) Not to any particular part of the world, to most people generally. It's simple to see that this true, if you have money, you keep it in a safe place only you have access to or in a bank, not with your brother. I think this was true even in the days of gold and silver.

2) The main downside is that the custodians might collude and run away with your money. The other downsides are the politics involved in chosing the custodians, the day to day annoyances of running the mint (even if the software is great there will always be tech issues that will have to be dealt with), the politics of chosing a fair fee structure to compensate the custodians, etc. In addition, having your friends and family serve as custodians might be better in terms of decentralization but it also introduces drama into relationships that you wpuldn't otherwise have.

3) It could be any "coin", the point is that it is a mistake to think thay Bitcoin is invincible. Ethereum has a lot of network effect and if they get a scaling solution with less downsides it might be preferred by the billions of people that will need to be onboarded in the coming decades. More worringly, cbdc-esque "coins" will come with the threat of state violence to reinforce their network effect, of course they have their own downsides (lol) but the fewer downsides our scaling solutions have the better.

Yes, but i'm mostly looking for your writings on Drivechains, not adopting your whole worldview, which is probably already aligned with mine if you're a Tuttle fan.

I have actually audited gcc because i am actually that autistic and sexless. I was hyper focused on a lisp transpiler at the time so it was part of that deep dive.

My point is, you quoted all of your written work in a comment opposed to drivechains. You mention a common objection that has been "debunked" from day two of bip300. Almost a decade ago, which means you not know what you are talking about. So, i could read 30 articles and use all that time to find the one relevant objection i'm interested in, or you could just point it out.

My goal here is find something wrong with drivechains, i'm a bug hunter, so sonething you say might be valid. But all the arguments so far against it have been really really bad. It's an interesting and worthwhile economic and technical project.

#6 In almost every cultural tradition Angels are part of a government structure. There is always some king, or in the case of angels, God.

#20 You admit the desirabilty of escrow. Drivechain/hash escrow offers this but with the direct similarity to and protection by Bitcoins own security, miners. Also, you fail to point out that the additive trust of a fedimint also contains the additive risk of its participants. This is slightly different than a betrayal.

A fedimint of a group of 5 is also liable to the risks of 5 peoples lives. Your whole model ignores the role and power of hidden, individual custody of money. In a village, a child of one member might become sick. Whereas before, someone could say they simply do not have the money to help, now everyone knows they have the money. This money could have been saved for next years seed purchase, but now it must go to the child. Someone else's child. Ones own survival is now at risk. Thus any money that would find its way into a common structure like a fedimint, would already be "gift" money, money that can be afforded to be lost. Such money is, in ethnographic terms, better spent in public acts of generosity p2p. In the bitcoin context, lightning micro transactions, not long term fedimint holds.

The whole basis for fedimint is based on an anthropological error made by wealthy westerners AND wealthy disconnected Africans about the people they are trying to help. Somehow Bitcoin has something to learn from cultures that are bad with money.

Fedimints attempts to appeal to a minor economic demographic that do not actually share their money the way they claim. Outside of funerals where money is put into a common pot, or specific projects that benefit everyone(themselves) everyone is trying to make and keep their money, FROM others. These specific scenarios can already by met by a direct utxo to the person they trust in charge of the project as is done with cash.

There is a saying:"A stranger is a potential friend, a neighbor is a dire enemy."

The game theory and principals behind bitcoin supercede local cultural expression of the use of money. Property rights are individual. The individual is universal. You either play the game in line with these fundamental properties or you suffer, in a long enough timeline. When we observe communal behavior, we are still observing individual behavior, outside of anything but insects.

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Wow, what a slog. Often repetitive and all over the place. The background floating graphic and the need to switch to reader mode to avoid it for each mini article made this entire attempt at reading your work very very unpleasant. Please compile your points into a TLDR, for this mess that would mean one or two long form articles. I mean, you bought a whole domain and repost links to it, so you want people to read this stuff right ?

Each post could have just been neatly organized on a single page with subheadings. Anyways, enough about the presentation, what about the substance?

You are on to something, it's just not ever clear what. It appears your point is: "Trust in institutions scaled civilization to a point where things are enjoyable." Wow, groundbreaking.

As a fellow writer, please take my critique in the lightess of touches. You put this out there and you use it as a response to several ongoing existential debates about bitcoins future, but there isn't really anything adding to the conversation. We know custodial and trusted structures scale.

The goal is to scale without trust not because of the nature of trust, but because of the nature economic self determination/innovation and the trend towards instituional corruption.

I think fedimint bros think that they'll be the one runnung the fedimint, so they never consider the downsides.

I wouldn't use a fedimint run by my family or friends because I prefer not to have money involved in those relationships. Most people feel this way.

May take years of pain to realize that a dynamic federation kept sybill resistant and annonymous through proof of work is a good scaling solution but it will happen. Let's hope the self delusion of fedimint bros doesn't retard this realization for so long that another coin gets more network effect.

Do you audit the compiler code that runs on your devices? Or any other aspect of your stack? Trust is how we scale technology. The term "standing on the shoulders of giants" comes to mind.

Also, the articles are not long...

Bike type of guy.

Better health

Nah, they have good friends to stay with if knowing not in vain.