40 sats \ 5 replies \ @nout 11 Sep 2022 \ on: Standard Sats against Fedimint Hype bitcoin
  1. As others also pointed out - Fedimint doesn't have fiat on it (at least initially), so you don't need hedging. Standard Sats is clearly solving for a different usecase, but there are some similarities with both having a trusted 3rd party (or 2nd party). Standard Sats is a cool project nonetheless.
  2. The risk in Fedimint is if more than half of your federation guardians are rugpullers - as far as I can tell they can easily withdraw all BTC without any limitations as long as they have enough signatures.
    • With StandardSats I believe you can at most block the sats, right? You can't withdraw all BTC from hosted channels that you are hosting, or can you?
  3. You seem to be comparing StandardSats and Fedimint on technical and philosophical aspects, but it's really important to also compare on end-to-end user experience and brand aspects. Those are surprisingly important. Many failed open source projects learn this the hard way...
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101 sats \ 0 replies \ @notgeld OP 12 Sep 2022
As others also pointed out - Fedimint doesn't have fiat on it (at least initially), so you don't need hedging.
Just Hosted Channels do that, too. It was much of the guesswork to talk about stablecoins but I should mention that in the original interview they also talk about volatility. The very case of Fedimint is just straight way to tokes while Standard Sats practically eliminates tokes.
With StandardSats I believe you can at most block the sats, right? You can't withdraw all BTC from hosted channels that you are hosting, or can you?
Yes. There is exit-scam risk. Host may shut down node, close channels and thus taking user's sats.
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10 sats \ 3 replies \ @itsrealfake 11 Sep 2022
important to also compare on end-to-end user experience and brand aspects.
can you expand please?
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122 sats \ 2 replies \ @nout 12 Sep 2022
User experience and brand are the key to actually gaining the traction and a user base. And this does not mean nice colors, this means thinking from the onboarding steps of how you get the app, how do people recommend it to each other, how do people get support when they get stuck, how many new concepts people have to learn to use it, how many manual interactions are required to use it, etc.
Each added friction prevents a fraction of all users from successfully onboarding.
Now we will have to wait to see how it works out with Fedimint or with StandardSats, but the thing to highlight with Fedimint and especially Fedi is that it has multiple good things going for it:
  • It pushes the setup to have at least 3 guardians (it doesn't sound like that StandardSats has any suggestion or even a default for this. Defaults matter.).
  • It makes it clear that you are selecting a person/group (not some online service) during onboarding
  • According to Obi, it will be provided on Umbrel, Nodl, etc.
In the end... Fedimint is one step better than centralized exchanges, but is strictly not better than you taking custody over your coins. It definitely introduces risk of rugpullers starting mints - so that has to be taken into account.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @notgeld OP 12 Sep 2022
It pushes the setup to have at least 3 guardians
Single operator runs Standard Sats Software. There is a problem yes. But there is no reason to think that it is easier to select group of guardians instead of one.
It makes it clear that you are selecting a person/group (not some online service) during onboarding
Sure. What guarantees that the group isn't the same entity?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nout 12 Sep 2022
It seems that the plan is to build social guarantees for that - in the UX it will pushing users to only join mints where you know the members of the guardian group from previous social connection. (I'm guessing this based on the interview with obi fwiw)
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