Fascinating. Nice find. Funny how the conceptual work that created bitcoin gets forgotten, and we rebuild ecash on bitcoin with same flaws. Maybe someone will make an ecash on bitcoin with its own blockchain to complete the while loop 😂

Do you mean that cashu and fedi are not the final instantiation of what chaumian ecash could be? I was assuming that the trade offs that we're seeing on these two systems aren't something we can get rid of, but maybe I was wrong? I'd like to know more

Interesting! This person knew about b-money though.

Afaik b-money was 1998 so the timeline checks it. I guess the cypherpunks mailing list readers would all be aware of it. Personally I thought b-money was pretty uninteresting, but I guess you had to be there at the time :)

"checks out", sorry

nice

This is an awesome find. I tried the Cashu extension on LNBits when it was a thing and accidentally double spent like 30,000 sats. It wasn't a big deal. I was the only one using it and I knew I didn't have those sata anymore, but it taught me fractional reserve banking can happen by accident. I still like cashu, mostly for educational purposes. My hypothesis is tools like brrr.gandalf.com can be used as tangible realia to teach people how to use Bitcoin. I think of it as a physical ChangeTip we used to use back in the day. I made a YouTube video about the website yesterday, but I want to make sure I convey the danger of putting Bitcoin on mints. Again, I understand people can get rugged, even if it's unintentional. Do you think it's possible to use these notes for small amounts of Bitcoin(like a few pennies) to teach people the concepts of self custody from a pedogogical perspective?

Hi @Ben Arc just out of curiosity: what exactly are the flaws of ecash?

Was that before he went to the pedo island?

I'd be willing to bet that Adam was part of team Satoshi. After vanishing for some years he came back in late 2013 playing dumb. But they still got to him making him an offer he couldn't resist. Blockstream was founded to deliver a heavily limited version of Bitcoin. No privacy/fungibility despite Adam talking a lot about it and no scaling without custodians. A Bitcoin that would still build on its early reputation, (ironically) prolonging the life span of fiat currency (read control-plane-capital on "freegold") however castrated as a medium of exchange so it wouldn't disrupt the machinery of banking dynasties. At least not too early.

does this mean that cashu is not real "ecash", but bitcoin onchain is?

Its a shitcoin

What I meant was that Satoshi was supposedly unaware of b-money until Adam Back told him about it.

From cypherpunks Sun Sep 19 20:43:05 1999 From: Anonymous <nobody () replay ! com> Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1999 20:43:05 +0000 To: cypherpunks Subject: Re: ecash means anonymous & untraceable (Re: Will this replace banking X-MARC-Message:

'Re: ecash means anonymous &amp; untraceable (Re: Will this replace banking' - MARC

>I wouldn't say ecash has to use blinding, but I would argue it would >be a misuse of the word "ecash", if something which was revocable were >dubbed ecash. > >With that definition it is not technically possible to implement >electronic cash at all without tamper resistant hardware, because >reliance on a mint, or double spend database means your "cash" can >become worthless over night if someone (say a government) decides to >switch off a computer (the one holding the double spending database). There are soem alternatives which would come closer to this definition. One possibility is to make the double-spending database public. Whenever someone receives a coin they broadcast its value. The DB operates in parallel across a large number of servers so it is intractable to shut it down. The greater danger is that the mint would be taken over and forced to behave badly, say by issuing too many coins. This would degrade the money and make it worthless. Another possible form of ecash could be based on Wei Dai's b-money. This is like hashcash, something which represents a measureable amount of computational work to produce. It therefore can't be forged. This could be a very robust payment system and is worth pursuing further.

Oh yes, great point! I'd forgotten that. Maybe 7 years+, Satoshi forgot 😄