It's going to be interesting to see how this custody model develops, will mints limit the amount you can hold under a certain amount to limit their exposure to customer funds and make it unattractive to use as a mixing service?
  • Will users know they can hold funds across multiple mints?
  • How will mints protect themselves by rules in certain jurisdictions?
Maybe the mints/tokens become abstracted away from end users.
Just like how your Tor browser selects a handful of relays to route with, maybe a fedimint enabled wallet will auto-select a handful of mints to distribute user balances.
Instead of earning "yield" like a traditional savings account, you pay a "tax" whenever one of the mints that held some of your balance rugs or is shutdown.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @om 27 Apr
This is already in development for Cashu. The user of several Cashu mints can make a Lightning payment cashing in tokens from multiple mints, and the receiver doesn't have to know.
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What I fear is mints coming huge bucket shops for scams and ruggings
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I can see that happening, sadly people will trust con-artists and not much we can do about it, its up to the individual to pick the mints they use, but at least you can have multiple mints and distribute your rugging potential
  • Maybe wallets can have UIs with reputation scores, but this can always be bought off or manipulated
  • Maybe wallets can have metrics like amount in the mint, number of users, mints an redemptions, but this can also be manipulated
  • Maybe wallets can warn you, you're overweight a mint and to migrate funds
I think there will be losses though regardless, scammers will always find a way
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Yeah this is the counter argument bitcoiners fail to recognize. I wonder how many complaints the FBI and FINCEN get from normies getting scammed.
I think it would be amazing if trusted institutions would set up mints like coinbase cash app Robinhood River and strike. Trust is somewhat already established and they already meet some sort of compliance. Then people can have privacy with their balances and have a minimal risk of being rugged. And if they do get rugged we have someone to go after.
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How would that work?
I don't think it helps to have eCash mints since you're already KYC'd so what's the difference from the current infrastructure? You could just log requests and link it to the account anyway so what privacy benefit would there be?
Maybe apps could have support for 3rd party mints, but I doubt that's going to fly with regulators
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It does help because the mint doesn’t know your balance. Vastly increasing your financial privacy.
I think that is the major value proposition even with KYC services. You still get some level of privacy with a trusted/legacy financial institution. Of course in the current political climate this would never pass (FISMA 2.0 just got broad support) but if the political climate changed then something like this can be a compromise.
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