TBH, I'm quite young with Bitcoin. I'm still learning basics about Bitcoin. When I see anything like cashu/Fedimints, this makes it really very difficult. I'm kinda confused..
Is Bitcoin not enough to succeed as sound money? Why do we need alternates?
Think about it this way: bitcoin is censorship resistant, fixed supply money. You can actually own bitcoin and no one can seize it from you.
But these attributes are not free. They come at a cost: 10 minute block times, limited block space, needing to run a node to verify the bitcoin you receive.
Things like ecash are being explored for use cases where people don't necessarily need or want to pay for all the heavy duty benefits of bitcoin, but they want some of the benefits.
It's more like ecash is a tool for bitcoiners to use. It lets bitcoiners do things they can't do with bitcoin (currently, maybe this changes) but it doesn't really scale bitcoin. It doesn't allow more people to use bitcoin because it's not bitcoin. But it still may be useful.
"on Bitcoin" doesn't seem like a very helpful distinction in the ecash context given any form of ecash can be trivially exchanged for Bitcoin.
Let's widen our apertures.
A central server running a non-chaumian version of ecash called Webcash (https://webcash.org/) has been in operation for ~30 months now with minimal downtime. It has a distribution mechanism enabled by SHA256 POW, inspired by Bitcoin but with an accelerated emissions curve. There is an easy to use Webcash wallet called WebCasa (https://webcasa.app/). Both of the projects are open source and can be found on Github.
Isnt Webcash Bryan Bishop's project? I think I heard him talk about it on Vlad's podcast or somewhere.
I don't understand what the benefit of non-chaumian ecash is. Wouldn't it mean the mint could see what you are doing, and if so why is it better than the current banking system?
Chaumian ecash is already a step in the direction of adding a third party, so why would we give up the benefits of privacy and censorship resistance and take on the third party risk?
Forgive me if I am misunderstanding how webcash works. I need to look into it more.
Is Bitcoin not enough to succeed as sound money? Why do we need alternates?