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1487 sats \ 3 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 18 Jan \ on: how is fediment ecash different than tokens? ecash
FWIW, yes, IMO, it is a separate self-custodial network where users hold their own ecash notes. Though one with price mechanics that closely follow Bitcoin's due to a certain confidence of whether or not you believe you're able to swap back into the bitcoin network at a later time for a certain price.
Also, we're all currently here using a custodial website where we have no privacy and we're trusting a single party. If you want to see a world where that's improved significantly, fedimint is on the road to that. Nobody is suggesting keeping your life savings on a fedimint, but is it better than stacker news, wos, ftx, or coinbase where they have unilateral control of your funds and can shut you down at any point in time?
To take things to the extreme, if a super majority of bitcoin miners turned off their rigs tomorrow or decided to keep colluding in a 51% attack, it would render bitcoin pretty useless similar to a majority of federation members shutting down. What are you going to do with your sats at that point if they don't get mined? At a certain point, you're already trusting a group of other individual companies comprised of other individual users that are not yourself and you have little control of whether bitcoin continues to function. You're trusting that it does, or at least the incentives line up for it to continue so.
I know it's not exactly the same. The idea that federations don't improve things significantly without introducing a BS pump and dump token pricing mechanism is where privileged bitcoins that spend a significant amount of time and money on this tech fall into. If you don't need a custodian, that's great, though you're still using them and they still improve certain aspects of your bitcoin usage and life. It's an exponential improvement the less technical and less wealthy a person is.
I'd be curious to know what alternative practical solutions you'd have for the many unsolved problems in bitcoin & lightning without similar tradeoffs when you dive into it. Hell, you're working on tech that is technically self-custodial too but functionally not, in order to better the experience of lightning. Do you not see a benefit there too? Do you think everyone have to be 100% self-custodial on chain (no lightning, because apparently it's bad to have a multisig with other parties involved sharing the same UTXO) in order see any benefit to bitcoin? Which is actually impossible to have, so the alternative is to exclude people from using Bitcoin.
from what i'm gathering from this and the other great answers in this thread, it sounds like fedimint is aiming to be a great decentralized (federated) and non-custodial alternative to custodial and self-hosted bitcoin/lightning wallets by offering a much better experience in many ways, such as better privacy, improved transaction reliability, and hands-off liquidity management for end users, for those who are fine with the "tradeoffs," such as a little more centralization than running your own node, not technically using or owning sats but instead a token-like voucher or note, and there still being a chance albeit a much smaller chance of a rug-pull than going with a full custodial solution.
in regards to custodial solutions, it sounds like a no-brainer. something like stacker.news running its own fedimint and facilitating value transfer through the mint instead of a custodial solution moving data around in a sql db (like lnbits) or something would be a really cool idea. i wouldn't be surprised if @koob is working on this already.
i disagree that bitcoin lives and dies with the miners. a federation disappearing with some funds is alot more final than miners turning off. i can always just start mining myself. i wouldn't recommend it haha but i could i guess. i can't recover keys within my lifetime to figure out how to undo the vouchers i obtained from a fedimint to try to get my sats back.
i don't have anything against the concept of a federation. a group of people making decisions for the (hopefully) best interest of a community, however you define that, is a scaling solution to a population growing. i also did not mean to imply, if it was taken this way, that fedimint is just a pump and dump "make a token" shitcoin. that wasn't my intent. the origin of my question was really just trying to understand the tech at a 20,000 foot view, which i think i now have thanks to this SN thread.
however, i do still think that it is another token. backed by bitcoin, which is fine, but a token nonetheless. the marketing around fedimints seems to work really hard not to use that word. instead opting for the technical (and probably more correct) name of "chaumian ecash." but at the end of the day, it doesn't sound like i own bitcoin. i own a token that is supposed to have a value that equates to sats in some way. however, it also sounds like there's no way to verify that, which is interesting.
all in all, in sounds like cool tech being worked on by some of the brightest minds in our space, most of, if not all, of who(m?) have only the best of intentions and just want to help bring the benefits of bitcoin to more people. i'm looking forward to seeing how it pans out and what new use-cases can come from it. i hear the module system in fedi is dope.
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I believe it's getting less and less likely that the average joe will ever hold real bitcoin in their hands in the future. Of course they'll still have the choice to do so but custodians of various types will grow so big and so slick that 90% of the planet will never even consider self custody for the same reason you wouldn't change your own car engine.
So SINCE society is destined to give custody of their keys to others, the game is all about how to make those others as trustworthy as possible. Token or not, Fedimints really do sound like one of the best ways to find trustworthiness in a custodian.
Liquid is great but the world doesn't know those 15 signatories personally. They can't actually trust them, even though mathematically they should be more trustworthy than your mom or preacher. But they do know their mothers and preachers and many other people in their society and assign them trust already. Fedi is here to take advantage of that trust and those existing relationships.
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/You're trusting that it does, or at least the incentives line up for it to continue so./
fucking nailed that line.
ITS ALL ABOUT INCENTIVES
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