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76 sats \ 7 replies \ @optimism 21h \ parent \ on: Are Cashu mint operators breaking the law? bitcoin
Like I said, IOU-ness can only be temporary; it cannot be a systematic approach. So you shouldn't be "Uncle Jim" forever, unless you're James, then you're that to your sister's kids.
I don't think Bitcoin needs it intrinsically. But humans need to help other humans, preferably not a persistent dependency, but a temporary workaround. These will always be needed, because a planet with 8 billion people on it will always have complexities.
100%
I've always felt that CashU was completely valid for short-term use. Imagine you go to a music festival and you buy CashU tokens using the festivals web app. Then you can go around buying food/drinks and eventually "cash out" back to Bitcoin at end.
This solves many issues with using Bitcoin in such an environment and only introduces a small manageable amount of risk.
Sadly though, this is probably a "money transmitter" service.
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Technically, if you're selling tokens at your festival, you're a stored value provider, so you're a money transmitter then too. Festivals are anyway traps where they throw away your bottle of Evian under the excuse that it could be GHB, but somehow the markup inside the gates is 300% - at a minimum.
The incentive of not honoring the IOU afterwards when people want to cash back out is kind of compelling though, so maybe they should just integrate LN straight, without the custodial aspect. Less middlemen, more joy.
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It feels like cashu exists because lightning is bad at async receive and on boarding with small amounts. People don't want to run an always available node and they don't want to manage liquidity. That is not going to change. Hopefully lightning gets to the point where users aren't aware they are doing these things.
The distinction between mints that operate for profit and not is interesting: if the laws are such that they push mints toward being nonprofit endeavors, I'd say that is bad -- one of the things that might keep a mint honest is if they are making a lot of money.
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The law under discussion is about asking for permission. You're only an illegal money transmitter if you didn't ask for permission to be a money transmitter, right?
What I meant to say, regardless of profit or non-profit, is equivalent of this:
- If I lend you $10 with no interest because you're short on cash and you need food, it would be really dumb for anyone to try and regulate me.
- If I sell 1000 people a mortgage at interest... I have less problems with regulation.
Bottom line, let the corporations be regulated. Let people be free.
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so maybe they should just integrate LN straight
Would be possible but much more complicated. First off you have the dreaded liquidity issues: Is the beer seller going to rebalance his liquidity channels mid-operation to get more inbound liquidity.....
More to the point though, the purpose of "tickets" is that the organizer takes a cut. So you sell beer-for-tickets and at the end of the show the vendor redeems the tickets they earned back to festival organizer for 70% value in cash (or whatever).
Point is, CashU most directly fits that model as Cash Tokens = Tickets pretty directly.
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Yeah, liquidity rebalancing is something that is best automated on LN. The mint will have the same issues (and I think I've seen this issue in the wild this year, twice) but it's centralized so it can spend more time on it.
I don't disagree that the solution could be fitting for a festival. Either way it should be possible, preferably without permission. The world isn't ready for permissionless though; half my discussions nowadays are with people that use GPT to try and show how smart they are.
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Is the beer seller going to rebalance his liquidity channels mid-operation to get more inbound liquidity.....
Cant he use Coinos?
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