If you receive nutzaps, how can you get it into a regular Bitcoin wallet? Interested in both theoretical and practical, but mostly practical.
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Probably lightning txn
you have to ask the mint to send you real bitcoin
Is that a standard part of mints, or do you mean like send the owner an email?
I think it might be a standard part of cashu but i haven’t really done any ecash stuff so i have no idea
Found it: 
You can "melt" a token to pay an LN invoice. To convert to Bitcoin you can plug in an LN invoice from boltz.exchange
This also makes it possible for "nutzap" wallets to do "regular zaps", by getting the invoice and then "melting" to it.
I think it's actually even possible to receive NIP-57 zaps, with a small glue layer between LNURL and the Cashu mint. The server needs to associate their Cashu mint somehow, then it give them a Lightning address. The LNURL call will make a proxy request to the "mint" endpoint internally to generate LN invoices.
GitHub
nuts/05.md at main · cashubtc/nuts
Cashu protocol specifications https://cashubtc.github.io/nuts/ - cashubtc/nuts
This ecash thing is neat, but the main problem it solves for me is a unified API for Lightning providers, so users can switch between them.
Isn’t that what NWC is?
Yes, that's npub.cash (by @Egge)
Hope the mint accepts your ecash for a lightning payment.
Yes, that’s what I was telling you yesterday;
Fuck, accidental post. I was saying you can have a NIP-60 wallet that pays NIP-57 zaps
This is true, but a couple dozen Cashu mints that require no authentication or KYC already exist:
NWC is only used by Alby AFAIK. The only reason to favor Cashu is the current ecosystem that supports instant anonymous wallets.
Bitcoin Mints
Which is why NIP-60 and NIP-61 are independent nips, they are great together, but are independent of each other. You could receive NIP-61 nutzaps and immediately melt them into your self-custodial wallet.
Self-custodial LN on mobile sucks. But NIP-61 could make it possible; essentially instead of creating a hodl invoice in the route, which is problematic from a liquidity and also causes issues when both sender and receiver are on mobile (as was illustrated when the mutiny and Zeus folks were at war), paying via a NIP-61 nutzap is like “parking” the sats on a mint until the receiver comes online and redeems all the cashu into their wallet.
NWC is easier for connecting your own node and doing self custody. If we are giving up on self custody then sure cashu is better. I am not gonna give though and I am surprised so many bitcoiners on nostr are like this. What happened to not your keys not your coins.
We should be building better self custody tech, not tech that is optimizing for custody.
Pave the way. That's my sentiment 💯.
I'm only following peer pressure. Truthfully I think the best solution would be to do away with Lightning and integrate Bitcoin natively. Everyone I've told about this seems to think it's a bad idea. But you know what, I don't want you to zap me 2 cents, I want you to zap me $5, so I think this would actually solve everything.
Its becoming harder on here since there are so many ecash people now its wild
Yes, npub.cash was doing something something like this but afaik their NIP-61 implementation with the p2pk locking is still not live, but yeah, doing this would be as simple as
LNURL gets request from a payer
LNURL server looks at the mints the recipient likes, gets an LN invoice
Returns the invoice to the layer
When the bolt11 is paid, mint the tokens and publish them
giving someone ecash is like giving someone a check
you don’t know if it’s real until you cash it in, which is not instant, and which costs the recipient fees
the mint could say 500 sats of your 1k sat payment went to fees
Bitcoin fees would skyrocket if you tried to put every zap or coffee purchase on it, then those things would become uneconomical and people would stop doing it. You need a system that is noncustodial and isn’t tied to bitcoin fees. This is what lightning is for.
Speaking of Lightning. Fix your node. I wanted to zap this comment 🤣
But nobody would. Nobody is going to zap $5 plus on chain fees for a social media post. or I should say very few would.
Maybe all 3 is the way. on chain zap, ln zap, and cashu.
Depending on if you are zapping, buying, sending, using robosata, etc... you could choose which method you want to use.
No solutions, only tradeoffs.
I don't plan to keep large sums of money in my zap wallet. I'll just keep a few bucks there to zap ppl. Not worth the inconvenience of running my own node. Especially when the likelihood of my... (Looks it up) $4.81 being stolen is pretty low.
i tried cashu to see all the hype, and gotta say that as a normie i find it easier to do NWC and connecting my own node and doing self custody.
but i do think the idea of cashu is interesting but i totally agree with about self custody
Its ironic
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Here's my controversial opinion. Firstly, Bitcoin Cash was right - their solution would have at least stopped the bleeding temporarily.
Secondly, I send Bitcoin all the time and pay less than $1 in fees, and it confirms within the next block. You can even choose to pay lower fees, and who cares if it's slow, it's a donation.
But if nobody else would support doing it on Nostr, there's no point. Or maybe I should just do it and prove everybody wrong. 🤓
I thought cashu supported NWC. Could of swore calle showed me a demo if this
Is it scalable to expect everyone on Nostr to self custody lightning or are you assuming many users will use custodial lightning?
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They aren’t right, they just delayed the problem instead of fixing it. Their solution severly harmed decentralization and would have undermined the entire project once you could no longer run nodes on consumer hardware.
Some wallets support it, not the cashu protocol itself
I’m writing a plugin for BTCPay Server to support NWC, I use it on my own server at the moment. Would be good if others supported it too.
Almost nobody is using Nostr, and even among the people using Nostr a very small percentage actually send zaps. The reason is because it's too hard. So if you're argument is that nobody will do it, that's already the current situation.
almost everyone uses lightning through a custodian. not using it through a custodian creates an unsustainable onchain footprint since every noncustodial lightning user must periodically do L1 transactions to fund and rebalance their own channels. you run into the same exact problem as the L1 for coffee scenario, just a little bit later. lightning should be scrapped in favor of other L2s.
Not only Alby, check out 
for a full list of wallets
GitHub
awesome-nwc/README.md at master · getAlby/awesome-nwc
Curated list of awesome projects implementing Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) - getAlby/awesome-nwc
There are problems with lightning self custody ux but im not giving up on self custody just because there are problems. We are engineers, problems are what we do and fix.
Isn’t cashu self-custody because it is a bearer asset / wallet?
Well, let's look at it a different way.
Zero people zap on xitter, Instagram, threads, reddit, or others. And by zap, I mean send monetary value of any kind besides a like, share, etc... not just Bitcoin.
There were 45k active users yesterday on NOSTR, 11k zaps were sent. many by the same people, but let's say 25% of the actives zapped.
That 2500 more people that sent money for reactions to posts than was sent on all the other platforms combined.
Seems worthwhile to build on to me.
you’re custodying the IOU/paper bitcoin. I’m talking about bitcoin self custody.
It is hybrid in that you hold the bearer cashu token on the device, but the mint LN node must allow the melting of the token to LN sats.
You can get a 24TB hard drive off Amazon for less than $500. The blockchain is already nearly 1TB - I had to upgrade the drive in my laptop to use it anyway.
I think delaying the problem would have been good, since Bitcoin still isn't even close to hitting the point of being used as an actual currency. But that is a lost battle.
The point is that Lightning is a premature optimization. If people were using Bitcoin to buy coffee so much it congested the network, then it would be a great problem to have. We would be a great shape in terms of adoption. But people are not even ready for that yet. We're like 20 years in the future, and sometimes I think we have to step back and look at today.
You can easily zap on chain, or even on a side chain such a liquid. Or better yet, we can run our own side chain with elements. On top of that payments can be batched, by reliable relays and only cashed out after batching, making on-chain fees tiny. The batching itself could use taproot and schnorr which would be native to nostr, and have tons of innovation adjacent such as silent payments. This is also lightning compatible.
Unpopular opinion: Zaps aren't the killer feature you are promoting it to be unless I can fully manage my bitcoin funds using the underlying zap infrastructure.
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I too agree with this 👌 just send bitcoin....E cash we get it u want privacy...get bolt 12 then...or coinos wallet that has it integrated boom privacy no need for cashu.
You can batch them. And reuse the relay network. Plus you can use side-chains. Add on top of that all the technology being built with taproot and it comes seamlessly to the npub/nsec system. Including smart contract, zero knowledge proofs, silent payments, and the equivalent of covenants without needing a fork.
Funnily enough, on chain zaps would be far better than LN zaps, just not economically viable for dust zaps
No, it doesn’t encode them, so it doesn’t need to follow a moving target
That makes sense.
Thanks for the clarity.
In general I don’t keep more of any non-onchain bitcoin in my apps/wallets than I feel comfortable walking around with in my pocket if I got robbed or lost my fiat wallet.
So I guess it’s less of a concern for me.
What is of concern is why do we need yet another layer (for lack of better word) on Bitcoin / Lightning?
Seems like for large transactions or ones I’m ok with waiting for confirmations, just send onchain.
If speed is important, use Lightning…
There are so many vectors in which this is wrong.
1. You need to be conservative as possible with changes if you’re trying to create sound money. Moving complexity to second layers makes a lot of sense because modifying core is too risky
2. You would lose all privacy. Having every transaction that can ever happen on an immutable public ledger is just dumb and will eventually fail.
3. Larger blocksizes screws up a lot of networking and mining., and so many other things. It increases IBD and makes it harder to sync with other nodes.
I could go on but this has already been gone over a thousand times
#Bitcoin is currently an optimum balance of transaction cost, security and speed. Making it immutable. Don’t mess with the balance. We do need more nodes however:)
I think few realize how cheap side chains can be. And that anyone can run one. You just need a 2/3rd majority of nodes that will not cheat. Now that we have a few reliable relays, they could bootstrap a new economy, then add more with dynafed, that the users trust. The cost of storing transactions would be insanely low, and therefore, so could the cost of on-chain zaps. You can also add things like silent payments and confidential transactions for users that want privacy with a slightly bigger tx. Plus enable op codes and all sorts of new innovation, as liquid has done. Fees could be a fraction of a sat, competing with lightning. But lightning could also be used. And dont forget that lightning can live on top of a side chain. Taproot opens up so many possibilities we have yet to explore!
Agreed, I'm surprised by the push for cashu. Cashu may add nicer onboarding into lightning, but we need better self custody experiences.
Imo we are one leap away from having it. Phoenix connects to a single LSP and is locked to the LSP. If there would be an intuitive way to migrate the channel to another LSP in the case Acinq goes down, then we have a fully self custodial lightning with great experience.
The centralization doesn’t just come from having to purchase more storage space. That’s part of it, sure, but there’s much more to it.
For one thing if the blocks were significantly bigger then it would take much longer to sync then chain and we’d have fewer people willing to wait. Adversarial actors at the ISP level would also be more likely to detect bitcoin traffic and throttle or drop the packets entirely. It also takes more computational resources to verify larger the larger blocks so CPU could become a bottleneck.
💪 a solution to this problem would be epic
Grifters don’t care about things like self custody, they care about things like ease of use. The easier it is to use, the more people come in, the more people that come in, the more zaps the influencers get for selling their grift. If someone is willing to compromise their principles for ease of use, then you know what their principles are.
Keep getting lightning errors but yes 💯❗️
I meant that sincerely btw not as an endorsement of ecash (though that’s not a DIS either)
Neither of you are wrong, which is why it was a nuanced argument.
Back in the long, long ago there was pretty much consensus, to increase the block size. However as time went on people realized that such a move had certain trade-offs. The two big ones were around decentralization. Firstly, bitcoin is unique in having a fair distribution of money. Secondly it allows hobbyists to run a node and verify the chain, and also prevent hostile take overs, which bcash (and seg2x) were. Hostile takeovers are very common in open source projects as they gain success.
By taking a conservative approach bitcoin was (just about) able to preserve the properties that make it unique. That's a big reason that bitcoin grew 100x in market cap, and is 200x bigger than bcash.
However, at this point most of the coins are issued. We still have to prvent against hostile chain splits and social attacks, but that's another problem.
There is still a case for a bigger mempool with lower fees. But I think we are too early because there are so many trade offs. And you can do this all on a side-chain anyway. Many devs are allergic to the block size issue, and with good reason. But actually were we left it in 2016 was that segwit was indeed a block size increase. And we'd be open to one in the mid term.
The basic problem here is that if fees go to zero, what prevents a reorg, when the subsidies go away. I think we need a full 4 years to discuss this topic in a sensible way. But long story short, both paths are possible and you can do all of this today with cheap fees on liquid or a side chain. Lightning is a great innovation, but let's face it, it's flaky at times, and users have high expectations.
Also look at how amazingly good litecoin is for transactions, and the chain hasnt collapsed (yet) from being about 5x bigger. LTC on chain fees would be under 1 satoshi, which is amazing if you think about it.
that’s what NWC is for.
what do you miss?
Awesome! But there already is one. How does your differ?
we should do both
CoinOS, LifPay, LNbits, Minibits, and I think a few other cashu wallets support NWC
On point!
This. Why can’t we make custodial lighting by more private AND focus on self custody?