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I dropped Cashu e-cash nuts in the saloon for 365 days. Here is what I learned

2586 sats \ 24 comments \ @BlokchainB 11h bitcoin

My endeavor to drop an e-cash token utilizing the cashu protocol developed by Calle in the stacker news @saloon for one year has ended.

I did this because I think sending tokens via a text string that can be transacted offline is the coolest thing ever. But the problem I had was not having anyone or anywhere to actually use the tokens I minted, so I decided to give them away for free on stacker news!

Below is the Bulleted Summary of my Experience

Bots quickly ruined the fun. Soon as I would drop a nut it would be redeemed in seconds
Apple Notes has a minor bug. The day counter wouldn’t save! The preview of the note would have the correct day but when I clicked on the note to update the day it counter would go to the day previous. Very odd
I tried different methods to break the bots but none were effective. Public Note was cool and worked but someone spammed it and the host shut the site down. The meme solution created the nut on their platform so I couldn’t tell if the nut was ever redeemed or not. Thus the bots crushed my fun with nuts.
I tried different wallets during this experiment. The cashu Wallet rugged me when they pushed an update to their PWA. I didn’t write down my seed words so those sats were vaporized! (One reason why don’t like PWAs!) I restarted with Cashu and things were fine. Once Zeus released its Cashu wallet I moved my nut making talents to Zeus. It’s been rocky with Zeus but over time they have made improvements.
For the mints I only used two. Minibits and OxChat. The OxChat mint stopped working on Zeus for some reason. So a few sats are stuck there. Trying to get help via nostr DMs and Zeus telegram support but both have failed. Minibits mint has worked flawlessly.
With my daily spam (which caused @Car to block me 😆) a few stackers became interested and spun up some Cashu wallets. But the bots ruined their experience of ever trying to capture a nut but over 365 days of posting I think maybe 5 stackers took notice.
Trying to defeat the bots I would change a few characters in the long e-cash string but that is when I realized the characters are interchangeable. Makes me think were most of the characters just filler? I didn’t dive deep into the overall protocol to figure out how the encoding works but I found it useless to change strings with no impact to redeeming nuts. Thus bots defeated that idea
I tried the Sovran wallet and it seem to work great but it was in alpha. It was buggy. I deleted the Wallet after a month or so
I tried to run my own mint using lnbits and that was a disaster. It worked for about a week then it just stopped working. The errors it was giving I didn’t understand so I deleted and lost sats
After the cashu wallet I used the E-Nuts wallet a lot! This was my favorite wallet and part of the reason I did this! About half way through the 365 days the Wallet developer abandoned the project. So when the wallet started to have issues I knew they would never get fixed. So I deleted this Wallet and moved back to cashu wallet.
To the E-nuts developer thanks for making an awesome e-cash wallet. I wanted to use that wallet to onboard people to e-cash (like I tried to do with my friend in Germany!) but in the end it was all for nothing. But the wallet was iOS native and very cool.

In Summary

It was fun in the beginning but in the end I am glad it’s over. After a year of dropping nuts I still don’t have a real reason to keep using e-cash.

Reasons are:

No one I know uses it or accepts it for anything.
I have sats stuck on the OxChat mint.
The cashu PWA upgrades without notice and rugged me.
The developer for my favorite wallet (e-nuts) abandoned the project.
Cashu on Zeus feels more like a gimmick than the natural flow I got with the e-nuts Wallet. To mint a nut the wallet start up takes too long.
The string can get extremely large! I broke the SN character limit on a few nuts.

That is all I can think of who ever wants the rest of my nuts on Minibits comment below and I can send them to you. Maybe it’s just to early for e-cash but I can wait until a killer app or service uses it in a way that sparks my excitement to use it again.

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177 sats \ 9 replies \ @jasonb 11h

With my daily spam (which caused @Car to block me 😆) a few stackers became interested and spun up some Cashu wallets. But the bots ruined their experience of ever trying to capture a nut but over 365 days of posting I think maybe 5 stackers took notice.

Hey, I’m one of these stackers!

Yeah, I got really excited about ecash because of you and am grateful. Don’t use it much now for the same reasons you cite, but who knows what the future holds.

93 sats \ 6 replies \ @jasonb 11h

If you haven’t already given them to a bot, I’ll take your minibits stash. :) haha

50 sats \ 5 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 10h

Awesome. How would you like me to send the nuts?

87 sats \ 4 replies \ @jasonb 10h

Thanks! Can you dm them to me on sn?

50 sats \ 3 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 10h

I can’t sn doesn’t have DMs

133 sats \ 2 replies \ @jasonb 10h

Oh yeah, duh. How about to this npub:

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50 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 10h

Awesome!!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @denlillaapan 3h

Nice

91 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 10h

Thanks for doing this. You're a pioneer.

108 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 9h

Thanks !

156 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 10h

I noticed your daily nut posting. I never tried to redeem one because it seemed like a lot of work. But it always made me smile and I'm impressed that you stuck with it for a year. I use a smattering of ecash-based wallets (minibits, boardwalk, coinos) and I enjoy hearing about fun things done by people who are interested in ecash. Sorry to hear that bots suck. Thanks for doing it!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 9h

It was fun just wish the bots didn’t ruin it for everyone

121 sats \ 0 replies \ @openyoureyes 9h

The main problem with cashu ecash: You have to understand bitcoin You have to understand lightning And then you can start to understand ecash.

You can not bring ecash to normal people that do not understand bitcoin or not even want to hear about it. You have to first find a use case. Or combine one or many use cases with something other people like.

I give you an example. Paying offline is something revolutionary. Printing your own ecash notes like the fed prints money is also revolutionary. Now combine this with lightning payments. Go out and ask somebody if they can pay your meal. You only have your own printed money, no phone. But you can show them how to spend this money on a voucher or something else. When they buy something with it, they will understand that it works. And then they can learn about bitcoin.

You can also start with a hobby somebody has. Just an example: You know people that love trains? Show them this use case: https://satoshkey.com/ They will love the idea.

And give nothing for free. It always has to be a journey. If you get something for free you can not price the worth. But if you have done something for it, you know exactly what effort it took to get it. Proof of work. It is very hard to fight bots when you post a nut in public. It is free money for them. They will take it. And they search for it all the time. You have to decode the nut with a secret or something like that. But it will always be a battle and if everybody start doing it the bots will adapt and start looking for secrets and decode the string.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 42m

The OxChat mint stopped working on Zeus for some reason [..] I have sats stuck on the OxChat mint.

It also stopped working on cashu PWA for a few days at a time the last month, perhaps 2 - I think this is just 0xchat being under heavy development. It works for me right now: I was able to receive and send sats on it.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 2h

I'm not really a fan of ecash, at least not for how I use Bitcoin. Maybe in a different scenario it would make sense. I even made a cashu.me wallet, but I never managed to get any peanuts, damn bots!

The string can get extremely large! I broke the SN character limit on a few nuts.

Seriously!? I still can't believe it, the SN limit is pretty big.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @denlillaapan 3h

Great job sticking with it. Consistency is admirable

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nichro 5h

Thank you for the experiment!

Was never able to harvest a nut in time but oh well.

I like cashu. Like you, I've played around a bunch but haven't found a reason to use it in my regular flow. Its still in early development with "experimental" warnings everywhere on the software though so maybe expected.

Im not even totally sure why I like it. Something about it is cool and using it is fun. Maybe one day it becomes the default instead of LN for custodial wallets.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Car 6h

With my daily spam (which caused @Car to block me 😆) a few stackers became interested and spun up some Cashu wallets.

Boog knows I love him, and technically I “muted” you for like 333 days of it.

I said from the beginning it was just an eye sore for my eyes, it could have been ASCII art with similar structure I still would have muted you.

Congrats on finally finishing looking forward to seeing normal everyday important posts from you like the old days of the saloon.

🤣

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 6h

Didn't realize it was everyday.

I think I got some of them nuts a while back. Every time I tried they'd almost always been taken. There's another guy on nostr who does something similar (B OG). I should check how many of the nuts are able to exchange back into LN!

Thanks for doing this!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @LibertasBR 6h

Thank you for your service. From your account, I can imagine the learning experience was huge, no matter how frustrating it might’ve been. I tried to catch some a few times — no chance against the bits.

I still see usefulness in Cashu for regions where the internet is too restrictive to use the LN. A trustworthy mint and wallet app will be very useful in such areas, and I hope Zeus can fill that role.

What was something you didn’t know about Bitcoin and these alternative networks at the start of the project that you’ve come to understand now?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Macoy31 9h outlawed

stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.