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Super exciting to see a company working on Fedimint. From what I understand, the Fedi company will be working on an end-user wallet that can point at whatever fedimint deployment the user wants. So you can have a local community bank, or an online bank in your discord group, or whatever you want. Fedimint is staying open source and other projects or wallets can be built on the protocol.
Really excited to see what this group comes up with!
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Grateful that we have incredible devs working on projects that will bring Bitcoin to billions. Bear markets are the best to time build. LFG
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183 sats \ 1 reply \ @kr 19 Jul 2022
Fedi also announced a $4.2M seed round today, excited to follow along with their progress.
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they also have a great blog post on their site announcing the creation of the project.
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Looking forward to this project. Will be watching closely!
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Super excited to see this. It makes a ton of sense that a good majority of users won't or can't self custody their bitcoin. I personally think that having a gradient of custodial options is ultimately a good thing.
BUT
Is this a good enough solution when we should be focusing on great solutions? I don't know what those could be, but I tend to agree with what's being said here.
Trading self custody for anything at this point in bitcoins life seems risky. Sure adoption is higher than ever before, and continuing to grow, but compared to its TAM (i.e. global population), it's tiny.
Are we throwing our weight behind scaling at all costs now, instead of censorship resistance at all costs? Anything that is not self custody introduces new risks around this.
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Is this a good enough solution when we should be focusing on great solutions
Fedimint is a great solution, yes. It’s not a quick dumb thing.
Trading self custody for anything at this point in bitcoins life seems risky
Self custody = lost bitcoins, destroyed lives.
I see this as a huge win. An intelligent way to manage ownership of your money without the risks that both exchanges and self-custody bring. Different set of risks, but much more manageable for regular people.
Are we throwing our weight behind scaling at all costs now, instead of censorship resistance at all costs?
Primary feature of fedimint is privacy (and thus censorship resistance).
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Self custody = lost bitcoins, destroyed lives.
Are you joking? Have you seen the number of exchanges going under in recent weeks?
If 10% of those self custodied, and 10% of those lost their coins the overall result would be far better.
Consider this: 7 transactions per second is about 220 M transactions per year. If we want to open one lightning channel for each of the 8 B humans, we'd need 36 years just for all the channel opening transactions. This is too slow.
Also having just one channel per person would lead to star topology, in other words, huge centralization. Two channels per person would lead to long chains of channels; for something resembling a useful decentralized network you need 3 channels per person. That'd be 108 years just to open all those channels.
Of course the block size could and should be raised at some point but this would also harm decentralization as it might drown some poor node operators by raising the storage costs.
Are we throwing our weight behind scaling at all costs now, instead of censorship resistance at all costs?
Um, yes. Censorship resistance at the cost of scaling is Monero's choice. But Monero is only able to onboard user number N+1 but not several billion new users.
Most people use LN either with a custodial wallet or with channel-managed wallets like Phoenix or Breeze. If for example EU government buries ACINQ (and it probably will!), Phoenix users would receive their money on-chain but won't be able to use Phoenix anymore. So there are already pain points that a government can press.
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Wonder what all the people using federated social media, who already have claimed "Fedi", which is the abbreviation for their online world ... the "Fediverse".
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Love the general idea but I've seen very little explanation as to how the end user is supposed to actually operate with their e-cash tokens.
Wouldn't holding the tokens securely require (almost) the same level of care as holding a bitcoin private key?
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This has the potential to be huge, especially for grassroots community growth of Bitcoin.
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i've been hearing about this. Is this a federated model kinda like liquid or does anyone can host it? Is there a finantial incentive for playing the uncle jim?
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could someone eli5 fedimint?
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a group (federation) that issues an asset that represents BTC and can be send and received inside the federation. It's not a sidechain nor layer-2. There's no blockchain.
Somewhat kinda like Liquid and L-BTC (in terms of peg in and out), but no liquid blockchain. And you can make lighting transaction across federations.
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You can create a sidechain and secure each other coins so to say. These side chains are interoperable through lightning.
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110 sats \ 1 reply \ @pi 20 Jul 2022
Will fedi make nunchuk obsolete?
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No, different use case.
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As far as I know, different fedimint coins would be incompatible. They would show up as different coins in a wallet. Because of this, the system tends to centralize into one, the most popular, fedimint. This makes the whole idea much more risky than having multiple competing fedimints.
Also, I'm not completely sold on the idea. To me it seems that there is a danger of false sense of security. Federating a mint to 20 bad guys doesn't make it safe, while it might seem so.
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No they are interoperable via the lightning network which removes centralization pressure. The 'Token' is just Sats and you can send Sats from one federation to another with normal lightning invoices. This is part of the innovation behind fedimint
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Cool, this makes it way better.
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Lots of familiar names in the investor list. There seems to be unanimous bullishness on fedimint.
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What are your thoughts on this? Are you fine with the tradeoffs?
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Custodianship is relatively lame to self custody, but privacy preserving custodianship is relatively awesome to normal custody.
Basically: self custody > privacy preserving federated custodian > normal custodian
It gets kind of interesting too when your fedimint custodian allows you to run smart contracts against the funds they are custodying. Seems like every custodian could become a Liquid-like federation; although, that might be naive.
Disclaimer: my understanding of Fedimint is strictly high level.
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Basically: self custody > privacy preserving federated custodian > normal custodian
sometime self-custody doesn't even matter given the specific implementation.
As an example, imagine your airline issues "Airline Tokens" (each token represents 1 airline mile). Does that really matter if you self custody? they are only redeemable by the airline....soooo...self-custody is a bit pointless in that regard.
However, imagine all major retailers join together as a federation of "Award Points Federation" and your airline is a member.
The result is that it removes the single point of failure of your airline just deciding to zap your air-miles balance to 0....basically it becomes a beneficial tradeoff given the reality of redemption.
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I'm really excited to see federated mints come to fruition! Will be keep a close eye on this project.
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Very promising product, I can see how it can help my family to own bitcoin in the future
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Great interview with the founder if you want to learn more about this. Seems promising. https://open.spotify.com/episode/5zEbSxncTvuWgSiCN7SYfb?si=IAJ_jlL6SCCgtEcCOdYJ_A
pen & paper chaumian mints explainer : https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/731755923