I don’t really have any use for Cashu. Bitcoin already gives me what I value most, self-custody and trustless settlement. Some say Cashu is about "trade-offs" and that trusting multiple mints somehow spreads the risk. But that logic misses the point entirely. Bitcoin's breakthrough was that you don’t need to trust anyone. Once you reintroduce trusted intermediaries (even in a "distributed" way) you’ve already stepped off the Bitcoin path. That’s not decentralisation; that’s just federated trust. It’s the same thinking that gave us Ethereum and its layers of custodial complexity. Systems where you manage risk by trusting more people, not fewer. Bitcoin isn’t about balancing trust. It’s about removing it. That’s why many Bitcoiners have no use for Cashu.

Replies (17)

Constantin's avatar
Constantin 1 month ago
Cashu is fun. If people want to spend time and energy on that, it is what it is. I'm all for travelling the unbeaten paths exactly because we don't know what we'll find there.
How do the trade-offs with the Rizful wallet differ from the trade-offs off a cashu wallet?
Respectfully, disagree. Bitcoin's breakthrough was that you don't have to trust *a central bank*. Bitcoins breakthrough is trustless scarcity. Hyper-bitcoinization does not imply trust is removed from every layer of our markets (financial or otherwise). Markets necessarily require financialization, and financialization requires varying levels of consensual trust. That consensual trust is GOOD and beneficial as long as the foundation is a sound money. It does not mean trust further up the stack will never be broken, of course it will. But when that trust is built/broken on top of a sound money, the system can heal properly. Various market interactions will always trend towards centralization and trusted models, because they are inherently more efficient along the happy path. That's a good thing (once coercion is removed!).
I think these mints have a purpose for trusted relationships. Like if you’re part of a group of friends that regularly do things together it would make sense to have a mint for fee-free exchange. Similarly, you could run mints for your household cash exchange (privately teaching your kids about digital money), if you find like-minded families you can exchange mint-to-mint via LN privately also. Federated mints would have more utility - you could have regional networks of like-minded people exchanging value privately. Think like a homeschool event network or something like that. You could use LN for those cases but you have to pay fees and lose the privacy add from the mint
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Nodiva 1 month ago
cashu is about completely frictionless (small) payments. You can add a header with your token and access paid services. Many such cases that are not possible with onchain or lightning.
For me it’s mostly useful for streaming sats and usage in API especially with very low amounts of 1 sat or even less. That’s where lightning has too much overhead. You pay a service with lightning and while using it, you spend your cashu balance. It’s a very convenient and painless way for developers to add bitcoin/lightning integration by using a mint.
Bitcoin doesn’t scale to all people for P2P transaction, at least it hasn’t. Does that mean it has already stepped off its own path?
DamsHash's avatar
DamsHash 1 month ago
Bitcoin is money but we need a payment system or layer Like savings account is the Onchain Wallet and a daily driver via Lightning/Liquid/ecash to spend sats Bitcoin is dollar Layer 2 is visa / Mastercard… Don’t Forget that when all BTC will be mined, miners will only get paid via Onchain fees that’s going to rise a lot So only important money transfer will occur via Onchain