the biggest privacy and efficiency benefits of ecash come when you transact fully within the ecash system. you lose privacy and pay fees when you go to another layer, whether it's lightning or on-chain or something else
how does it work in practice?
mints will hold balances of other mint's ecash and settle up with each other at regular intervals via lightning. this is exactly how free banks operated in the 1800s before the state shut them all down
user wallets can do the same thing. when one ecash user wants to pay another their wallets will collaborate in a privacy preserving way to find a common mint they both trust. if no common mint is found, then fall back to lightning and pay the lightning fee
seriously, every bitcoiner should read up on free banking. these are not new problems. they've already been solved. we just need to rebuild those solutions in a new technical medium
Replies (6)
Lightning (for the sender) also has pretty good privacy from the external world, but without ecash, your service provider always knows it was you who initiated a payment. Similar for receiving on LN.
Yup. I built it, but it works a bit differently. Mints don’t know or care about other mints. Users have in their wallet ecash from different mints - they decide what to do. If they don’t trust a mint, they just swap from one mint to another, settled via lightning invoices. The mints don’t have a clue what’s going, except their own issuance and redemption.
that's how every cashu wallet works
sure it sounds great, but is anyone working on that? because as far as I know there is no interface for sending tokens from mint A to mint B and no wallet does that
did you share your vision with the cashu stakeholders? are they working towards it?
Calle retweeted it so....yes?
I don't think I'm the first one to have this idea. It's kind of a natural direction to go. But it's very early for ecash. Lots to build. Not sure where this falls in the priority list.
