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I get the benefits of ecash but I don't understand how the mints will avoid government intervention. As the mints are central points, won't governments force them to track users? Will government approved mints only allow you to transfer to other approved mints.

Finally, most users don't care about privacy(I hope I'm wrong) and will not care if the mint tracks them or not

With lightning, it's P2P and nodes who forward payments don't hold custody of funds.

Although ecash could make sense for use cases like stacker news. Stackers could zap each other ecash non custodially

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You can use ecash with SN already: #752528

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Ah I meant using ecash instead of cowboy credits to avoid custody legal issues

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193 sats \ 9 replies \ @ek 4 Dec 2024

If you're saying we run our own mint: ecash is custodial, so no, that wouldn't avoid any legal issues.

If you're saying someone else runs the mint: that is #752528

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Ah maybe I'm miss understanding how stuff works. In regards to #752528 . If I connect an ecash wallet and zap someone who doesn't have a wallet connected, I'm assuming that becomes cowboy credits?

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If the receiver isn't online, who custodies the ecash when you send it to them?

The best you can do is bind the notes to a receiver's keypair, but that requires the receiver to trust the sender's mint until they come online (a delayed, possibly fraudulent promise of settlement) ... unless you send to the receiver via lightning which is #752528.

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Yep that's what I was thinking. Sender encrypts bearer ecash with receivers pub key. Stacker news stores that encrypted blob. No custody issues for you as you can't get the money.

Yep, the tradeoff is you have to trust the sender/zapper not to double spend that ecash. Think that's ok in the zapping situation.

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Yep, the tradeoff is you have to trust the sender/zapper not to double spend that ecash.

It's not just that. The receiver also has to trust the mint to let them redeem real money and without KYC.

For Stacker, it's also important for us to be able to verify the payment is real and what the sat value is.

If I connect an ecash wallet and zap someone who doesn't have a wallet connected, I'm assuming that becomes cowboy credits?

yes

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You mean governments will force people to stop offering mint services? That didn’t work with torrents, and it won’t work with mints either. They tried and failed; every time they shut one down, three more pop up with better opsec technology.

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Mmm although the difference is you need to trust the mint not to rug you

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Finally, most users don't care about privacy(I hope I'm wrong) and will not care if the mint tracks them or not

Then you don't need ecash, you just need a database.

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