31 sats \ 0 replies \ @tolot 13 May \ parent \ on: Thinking through Cashu bitcoin
This is true indeed. A project called GNU Taler is already in place to use ecash (a variant that is less privacy oriented) with classical financial institutions. I can see some major tech issues (other then the obvious other issues related to the more "idealistic" views on privacy):
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LN is a protocol and the "glue" between mints, thus the intra-mint transfers go as smooth as oil. The financial system does not have this kind of standards for small amounts, moreover minting and melting of tokens with LN can be done in seconds and does not need burocracy or other guarantees, which is good because if I mint a barer token to a user and I dunno the users at all, how can I reverse the financial payment that generated the minting of tokens in case of a fraud? With LN there is no such a problem: if the invoice is payed it means that the payer had the cryptographical right to sign that transaction, so we are fine with the immediate minting of ecash
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LN can execute multi path payments, meaning that if I have 100 sats with mint A and 50 with mint B, I can send 130 sats on the LN to a mint (or user) C simply by requesting a MPP from mint A and B at the same time. This is not possible with the classical financial tools at all, so for fiat ecash every user would be limited to spend at maximum the biggest amount of ecash that he/she has with the same mint.
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Because of the willingness to keep AML procedures in place (and to be able to extract taxes) ecash proposals with fiat all have one thing in common: privacy is not actually in place. For example, in GNU Taler the receiver does not have privacy and this """"feature"""" has been implemented to enable tax monitoring and AML. This means that the transaction cannot happen offline, leading to a HUGE limit in terms of technology. May be an implementation issue with GNU Taler and not a general problem, but I highly doubt that governments would allow a perfect privacy-oriented ecash system without even blinking an eye.
The double spending is solved by the presence of a central server. Once you send the token to someone, that someone shall query the mint to understand if the token has been already spent or not. If so, then the token is invalid. If the token is not present in the mint database of spent coins, then the token is valid, the mint collects the token and returns to you a new token of the same value.
Actually a "token" is a bunch of tokens, like $100 in cash can be made up by some banknotes. A cashu ecash token can be of value 2^n, thus 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ....
If you have some friends using your node as a custodian node, you're better off with cashu. If you are providing custodial services on lightning, you're better off with cashu.
Clearly not every LN node will be a mint because economically it makes no sense. But there are use cases
Could be, I'm not very knowledgeable about them to understand the turning point of the saga. To me they are simply computer-graphics enhanced videgame-like films. I prefer shows and films in which actors are actually acting, not simply moving their bodies to be a proper model to fit the computer-designed graphics.
But I have pretentious tastes, I know
Nope, even though the Cashu protocol unveils different dynamics than the simple self-custodial/custodial.
A couple of points in this regards:
- Ecash cashu tokens are self custodial, in the sense that you hold them and nobody else holds them for you;
- Cashu mint is a trusted third party, because it is responsible of double-spending avoidance.
I would say that cashu is a protocol in which there are third parties involved, thus it raises a counterparty risk. Technically, cashu tokens are self-custodial.
But this is a nuance...to simplify it to newcomers is fine to call it a "custodial" system.
I wonder if it will ever be possible to have an onchain UTXO acting as a mint, but I never thought through this technically speaking
Fantasy jacked superheros definitely fit the definition of "everyone like them but I don't".
Marvel and DC stuff
In my opinion this illustration is only able to convey that "these guys are fabulously rich, which is effectively a nothingburger. A more graphical explanation, maybe a treemap with some zoom-in features could represent in a more compact way the information.
Appreciate your time preference horizon, you may be right.
I don't think in Act terms because I see things as more complex than a simple n-step evolution, mass MoE shall happen before the mass adoption as SoV, otherwise mass SoV withouth MoE means full bag holders with no use case.
Farmer may start receiving bitcoin and then start studying it. From studying he/she maturates understanding and starts saving the bitcoin that he receives from time to time, when before he/she was selling to get fiat. This is not a necessary path, but is how 90/95% of merchants accepting bitcoin actually understood bitcoin, at least from my experience.
I'm firmly convinced that without the "maxis" (as you call them) Bitcoin would never be here, SN would not exist. It takes fkng commitment to work on something, push hard, overcome technical issues when the World believes that you're doing something stupid. For years Bitcoin has been something stupid for the general public, only the "maxis" virtue signaling kept stuff together.
Other than that, I don't think "maxis" are the issue...the issue is the shitcoining idea to earn more fiat shitcoins with the appreciation of bitcoin price.
PS. Nobody cheered the Ver arrest. If you know someone that did that, you've an issue in your friends circles.
PSS. SoV is strictly related to MoE: if something is SoV than people would be willing to earn it. To earn it someone should give it to you. The only thing I would focus on with this regards is the idea of noKYC-MoE, which is possibly the real issue now. Governments could possibly decide to let us bitcoin, but with full KYC and other orwellian measures...this is the issue. To tackle this we should focus more on adoption at the merchant level, which means that sometimes we should go out and pay with sats, to make the sats flow in the real economy. But SoV is still a key point and does not falsify this concept.
PSSS. Do you have some suggestions mate? What would you do differently? We're all ears.
Jumping in there just to say that "NgU fanatics" means hodling the sats as there was no tomorrow and never using them in the fkng real life.
People do not use bitcoin to pay for stuff, which is very very very very dangerous for our industry. Do you think that merchants all of a sudden will start accepting bitcoin just because we hang about saying that is good money? Bitcoin is good money, but not anyone gets that, and if the farmer that should sell you the meat is not getting the Bitcoin gist, then no meat for you mate.
Financial-bitcoin is liquid, very liquid. Huge volumes for that potentially, so the bag holders can sell their damn KYC bitcoin to ETFs and back.
But real-life-economy-bitcoin? Is it liquid enough? Will I be able to pay for a pizza, hotel, groceries with bitcoin in 2030? Will I be able to actually spend my good, very good money in the future?
So yeah, NgU is inscribed in the idea of money, but let's not forget that money eventually needs to be spent. If you can, than that's good money. If not, than what are we talking about?
PS. Collateralizing UTXOs in order to get new brand printed fiat shitcoins is not the future I imagine, even though that's a use case. But still, at the end of the chain the sats should have a real-economy value in transactional economy.
End of the rant of a bitcoiner that tried for years to talk about adoption and spend&replace.
This is an interesting reading about this topic: https://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/posts/bitcoin-interplanetary-frontier
Yep. No offense to anyone, but SN is simply someone else's server, just like StackerOverflow. I've no issues with SN btw, simply highlighting the fact that it would be not an advancement.
Building it on a neutral protocol would possibly generate a different outcome in terms of no censorship etc. Clearly there's an issue of spamming and, if referring to "correct" and "wrong" stuff, there's the risk of people abusing it by posting notes that cannot be deleted. That is an advantage of Nostr that is difficult to manage with this other kind of "forum-like" discussion platforms.
Anyways, forums (like StackerOverflow or SN) are still way better than the paywalled gardens like damn Telegram, Discord etc. Anyone is moving to these solutions and we're not realizing that the usefulness of information relies on its availability. stuff on telegram is not reachable easily. Same for Simplex btw.
This follows critically the dead internet theory. Nobody cares about hosting their website, nobody writes blog posts anymore, nobody tries to live digitally outside from paywalled gardens and others' servers.
In a serverless digital society the servers are simply of someone else. And now we are paying the price of it.
PS. Waiting for a StackerOverflow-like platform on Nostr
It depends really...if you opt in to all the saga of ordinals disrespector and the datacarriersize=0 saga you are not very well off with your own mempool for fee forecasting.
In such situation, mempool.space fee forecasts are more realistic because of their non-biased mempool policy.