GM

Happy #BitcoinHalving

#artstr #art #illustration #artonnostr #nostrart #original #design #grownostr

Ok I've built this for fun and it's incredible.

A Cashu gateway: it's a normal Cashu user who has a Lightning node (or another Lightning payment backend). Everyone can act like a gateway as long as the mint supports ecash HTLCs (NUT-15).

If you as a Cashu user know of such a gateway, your wallet can send your Lightning payment request to it instead of to the mint.

The gateway responds with an amount (it can take a fee). If you agree, you send it ecash, and it pays your Lightning invoice. The process is atomic.

What does that mean? Let's think a little ahead and imagine this was deployed on a significant scale.

Even if the mint is full KYC for peg-in and peg-outs, a user could still make Lightning payments anonymously with the help of other users.

(!!! this alone would be huge !!!)

This would also enable us to make on-chain-only mints which opens up a whole new way of building mints (reserves could be in a multisig for example).

Crazy part: Gateways can be lazy and use custodial Lightning backends. The user doesn't care as long as the invoice gets paid.

Yes. That means you could use your Strike or Blink or LNbits account to act as a Gateway for a Cashu mint you like.

There could be many of crazy people like you. Nobody would ever know. Neither the mint. nor your LN service provider would notice. They all just see invoices.

It gets weirder. Gateways could use *another Cashu mint* as an LN backend. I know sounds like an inception nut but bare with me.

A user of mint M1 can ask a gateway of mint M1 to pay an invoice. The gateway could pay the invoice via mint M2 and receive ecash from M1 in return.

I always thought "you could run a mint for a thousand users on a Strike or a Blink backend without them even noticing the smallest thing".

Now I think you could probably run a mint for 100k users without them noticing, if there are other gateways handling payments for everyone.

Note: this is still experimental. Only paying works right now over the gateway, not receiving (more complicated).

The bast part though is that it doesn't require any Cashu protocol changes and the mints don't have to give you permission to do this.

It's all pretty nuts.

nostr:note142qdxj9dnp9nsmsuet9vw5pgtgtwj4e7vxv5qa0wvk8vdqy76cdqw3d5kr

GM

Just finishing a custom #bitcoin #halving piece for npub1nvfgglea9zlcs58tcqlc6j26rt50ngkgdk7699wfq4txrx37aqcsz4e7zd

Stay tuned for the second half 😁

#art #grownostr #Austriches

As always, thank you Wiz 🫂very grateful for your work and making the bush bash. It changed my life.

When when I'm met with someone who's advocacy for any other form collectivism coordination it should always be met with this simple summary as i feel it is a quite complete encapsulation of the coercivists VS voluntaryists debate

Should the world be ran by voluntary interactions and exchange guided by individual economic decisions

OR

should the world be planned and dictated by a small group of arbitrary people elected by a majority whom force their decree in everyone with violence.

Hey UK Nostriches, a friend of mine is looking for a good place to start buying Bitcoin. She's a complete beginner and not super tech savvy, so please don't suggest P2P self-custody quite yet (we'll get there).

Looks like many of my go to's aren't supporting the UK any more.

Where should she go?

Dumb.

*The Rare Sat Lie*

Let's start with some facts.

You cannot own a satoshi (sat). You can only own a utxo, who's value is measured in sats. Just like you cannot own a "kilogram" but you can own something which weights a kilogram.

The idea that a sat can be rare is a lie, since sats don't exist.

A utxo also cannot be sold, because as soon as it is spent, a completely new utxo is created, and the creation of this new utxo makes the previous utxo (which you wanted to sell) spent. To act of spending "an unspent transaction output" (UTXO) transforms it into something fundamentally different, a "spent transaction output" (STXO) and creates a new UTXO.

The idea that a utxo can be sold is a lie, since even utxos cannot be sold.

The idea that a rare sat from a "special" utxo can be bought is thus a double lie.

*Rare Sat Sophistry*

The conmen, the useful idiots and the otherwise honest but contrarian pundits will rationalize the spreading of the "Rare Sat Lie" with sophistry and appeals to libertarian morality such as "it's a free market, people can believe whatever they want and waste their money however they wish".

Of course, this line of reasoning is meant to create strawmen arguments so that every person that is righteously indignated at the spreading of these lies can be painted as being opposed to the concept of individual freedon itself, which immediately places the TruthSeeker's outrage outside of the Overton Window (and subject to ridicule).

Let us dispell the strawman argument.

The "market" (a small niche of degenerate gamblers) can want whatever it wants, yes. But it till cannot change the reality that individual satoshis (sats) do not exist as "things" or virtual objects. This reality is not subjective.

The sophists will also rationalize that "it cannot be stopped" and thus all you can do is "cry harder" (ironic eh?) and that any and all attempts to combat the lies are futile (at best) or stupid.

It may be true all the truthseeker can do is cry and shout, but it is also true that to combat the spreading of such lies is a virtuous and noble pursuit. And it is also true that the direct result of the shouting can be to save a victim from otherwise being conned. Which is, we would all agree I hope, a moral good, if not a moral imperative.

People are free to spread the lie that such things ("rare" "sats") are real, and fraudulently sell utxos of low value presented as "rare" "sats" for utxos of higher value, but to do so by exploiting the ignorance of people and confusion around the complex technology of Bitcoin is evil according to nearly almost moral code that ancient and modern civilizations have produced.

I am the last person that would deny someone the right to be evil. But I believe if you see a fraud and you don't call out the fraud then you too are a fraud.

So, the strawman is really just straw.

*The Rare Sat Con*

Beyond it being morally bad to spread lies generally, the spreading of the lie also occurs within the context of textbook confidence trick.

Confidence tricks involve :

- the mark: the victims whose money is to be acquired fraudulently

- the roper: reels in the mark via exposure and marketing, peaking the curiosity of the mark (i.e. a conference or media organization)

- the inside man: provides a venue for the con to take place, or supplies goods and services used in the context of the scam (a mining pool or a marketplace)

- the conman: gains the confidence of the mark extracts the money (the seller of a rare sat)

- the convincer: an acolyte of the conman which gives a taste of the profits to the mark either by investing in the mark, or showing off his profits to the mark (a fellow rare sat trader)

The conman and the convincer can interchange roles. For example, conmen and convincers can publicly con each other repeatedly and alternatively, with gains and losses which compensate, with the tacit understanding that the goal is really to gain the confidence of a mark from which both convincer and conman can extract money from.

Everyone except benefits in this zero sum game, except obviously the mark.

In the end, the mark was never forced to give up his money. He willingly parted ways with his funds, deceived by the confidence trick.

Selling "rare sats" for utxos of higher sat value is without doubt a confidence trick.

I will let it up to your imagination who you think plays which role in the rare sat con.

I was told that you're supposed to mellow with age, but I feel like the older I get, the more radicalized I become from observing my government's actions.