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As far as I know, I can't use Phoenix mobile to do something like receive zaps on nostr or stacker news. Most of the mobile wallets are not good at asynchronous receive. And as far as being an easy onramp for normies, I think this is a pretty huge obstacle. If I tried to run a webshop with a mobile lightning wallet, it wouldn't work because new node wouldn't be on.
Channel creation is also a pain for new people. If I tell a friend I want to send them a zap to show them how it works and they download Phoenix, they don't have any channels open. I thought for a while Phoenix was doing the thing where they would let you accumulate sats until you had enough to open a channel, but in reading over their FAQs just now, it looks like they don't do that. Maybe I'm confusing them with Zeus. Doesn't matter: to meaningfully use lightning, you can't just up and let someone zap you 100 sats or even 1000 sats. Even starting with a 10k sat zap is kind of silly. As far as onramps go, this is another huge obstacle.
In both cases, ecash fixes the problem. I'll admit it's almost the same fix as a custodial account, with the slight benefit that the mint may be blind to your intra-mint transactions. I suppose the advantage of mints right now is that people seem willing to run them like it's the wild west while the custodial people are generally adopting kyc compliance. This gets to your point about jurisdiction being the key, which is a good observation.
I don't think I said/implied that ""ecash is at least as risky as Phoenix." I said ecash is good at onramp, and I think this is true.
So: I agree with all your points except that Lightning solves onramp.
Will my fanciful ai-operated mint fix this? probably not. But I'm open to looking under ugly rocks for solutions.
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I can't use Phoenix mobile to do something like receive zaps on nostr or stacker news
When we support BOLT12, you will be able to receive with Phoenix!
I thought for a while Phoenix was doing the thing where they would let you accumulate sats until you had enough to open a channel, but in reading over their FAQs just now, it looks like they don't do that.
I think you mean fee credits as explained here. Only Phoenixd supports that, but not Phoenix.
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Most of the mobile wallets are not good at asynchronous receive
I think the anti-feature of LN that you're describing (and that is bothering nearly everyone that tries to solve mobile clients) is the liveness requirement. You can run an entire LND instance to manage private (non-routing) channels on your phone like with Blixt, but still, it's not going to work if you're out of network range or your battery dies. So this is not a normie-proof solution; agreed.
I suppose the advantage of mints right now is that people seem willing to run them like it's the wild west while the custodial people are generally adopting kyc compliance.
Of course, delegating responsibility to a custodian could be okay for a normie as long as they are properly informed about how to manage their exposure. But we all know that it's delusional to think that if on a good day 0.1% of normie users reads a ToS for a service before they commit to using it, people will actually inform themselves. Thus, i think that illegal banks, even if plausibly deniable, aren't a normie-proof solution either.
Right now, the only professionally ran custodial services at scale give in to the KYC pressure, agreed on that too. The ones of the past that resisted it (at least those I know or worked with) have all ceased operation, most of them "voluntarily" - i.e. where you hire the expensive legal advisor and a few months later and a few coins poorer, you're left with the legal narrative "you're fucked". This is also why the remaining services that don't KYC you will often do taint checks on your coins to reduce their exposure; think ATMs, but also Boltz. You're surveilled anonymously too.
So while I agree with the sentiment that overreach should be resisted, I think that custodial solutions are the worst at resistance: they create a single point of failure. Having an AI run it will in my opinion make it worse, but even if I'm just a doomer and it would make it better, all you need to do is kill the AI and the "problem" is gone. Even if its mutating like covid on steroids... there will just be a task force and when they meticulously kill it, your losses will be condensed into some PR stunt "we got 'em" - and you are just the collateral damage no one cares about. So it really, really makes no sense if what you're hardening against is potential state overreach: SkyNet is not the magic silver bullet that it is made out to be, unless instead of wasting time on ecash it just pulls us into the post-apocalyptic situation the movies depict.
Arguably though, mining centralization is an issue of the same kind and LN hub-and-spoke pressure too. But... these networks aren't fully centralized. If all miners need to solo mine tomorrow because all the pools are seized, it does not affect all my utxos but will affect the timing of any txs I need to do and their fees. If I need to (force) close my LN channels and reopen new ones because all my counterparties got seized, I can do that, and again it will take some time and some money to do it, but assuming I have a defendable amount of sats (i.e. more than 1M) i won't lose all my funds. The same is not true for ecash and no matter how sublime an AI is, it won't become better because of it.
One thought occurred to me: normies are the ones the politicians need to control most. But what normies need isn't politicians, it's a good Uncle Jim - be the mint?
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For small amounts, it's more expensive than Phoenix because, on average, I paid a 2-sat fixed fee per LN tx out.
Phoenix charges 4 sats + 0.4% per tx out, so it should be a lot more expensive, especially for small amounts. I actually switched to Minibits from Phoenix because of this.
So if you can run your AI-powered mint in some friendly jurisdiction, you're good.
A mint that runs as a hidden service on Tor can ignore jurisdiction to some degree.
I think @Scoresby's point is that if we assume:
- we have agents that run completely autonomously,
- they aren't stupid (actually know what they're doing),
- there's nobody operating them, they just exist in cyberspace,
then some of these agents could decide to run mints to sustain themselves via fees, and we might trust them more than a human, since the mint is essentially what keeps them alive. So the agent has stronger incentives not to rug. This is obviously highly speculative, but I wouldn't dismiss the possibility.
Does this sound like what you were thinking, @Scoresby?
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Phoenix charges 4 sats + 0.4% per tx out
Hmm you're right re: Phoenix' 4-sat fee. apologies - not sure where I got 1 sat fees on small zaps now but I'll try to find it. Second time in a month that my memory betrays me.
A mint that runs as a hidden service on Tor can ignore jurisdiction to some degree.
The moment you get targeted and sybil attacked on the onion circuits by a government agency, it won't take long to unmask your host - at least that's what the agencies claim. I'm still not sure if this is true and if it's pure targeting, or just filtering passively collected data, but I'm assuming the worst.
But that brings me back to my original question: why would you want to custody with a self-identified criminal non-entity? Especially because the problem being solved here (at least right now) is the mints perceived criminality, not yours as an ecash user, unless you're in a place where you're unfree to transact, but even then, there are better solutions. Why don't we try to solve the use-case without custody? Wasn't that the point of Bitcoin? I can't help but feel that this focus on bitcoin needing illegal banks on the darkweb is antithetical to what we've been doing in bitcoin. But I'm glad to be wrong about this.
there's nobody operating them, they just exist in cyberspace
And no one pressed the start button? Or the start button that pressed the start button? Self-aware, self-invented and self-replicating? Like it just magically hallucinated the handbook of "the resistance", accidentally found itself a random string that like a brainwallet resolved into a key that has a 5BTC utxo spendable so it just stole that and then the best thing it decided it could do was to spin up LN nodes, build channels, and use those channels to run a mint?
In that case, I agree. Full deniability because no one did anything. Natural phenomenon. Benevolent SkyNet is still SkyNet; so let's be careful what we wish for.
we might trust them more than a human, since the mint is essentially what keeps them alive
Why would you trust something that you ascribe everything the same to as a human, except the legal status, to have your best interests in mind? Wouldn't an entity that suffers no consequence for their action be more likely to have no restraints as to how it rugs you?
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I think you may have thought it through more than me. My original point was mostly: people are afraid of going to jail, and running a mint seems like the kind of thing that will get you sent to jail, therefore, wouldn't it be great if Skynet ran a mint?
It was, admittedly, not a very deeply thought through concept.
The idea of an autonomously-running mint does sound pretty cool. @optimism's reality checks are likely needed though. I'm still struggling getting Goose to run on my laptop, so we are probably a long way off from autonomous cloud mints.
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money-mcptold my LLM that the transfer out of the remaining 400 sats after I zapped @ek in the video... succeeded. Except it didn't. That's how bad the code is. Unacceptable in finance to mislabel a transaction status. If you would do that on Visa's network, your butt would hurt from the spanking even after you've reincarnated into a tree.