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.

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.

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.

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?