reply on: What is fedimint to you? \ stacker news ~ecash

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @denzel 11 Jan \ parent \ on: What is fedimint to you? ecash

All the companies in https://ten31.vc/home/#portfolio took investment and have obligations to provide good returns to their investors. The VCs take money from other investors and they have to do the best for their investors. So the question remains when it comes to privacy, opensource software, decentralization and freedom tech. How do people get good returns.

Ten31 did not invest in Fedimint, they invested in Fedi. Fedi is a company that is expected to make returns for its invested (assumedly). Fedimint is a protocol that anyone can use.

You are right, Fedimint is only receiving donations including donation from Human Rights Foundation. Fedi Inc. is a different company, which got $4.2 million of investment.

So that is good. I also checked the 12 active contributors of Fedimint github, none of them seems directly related to Fedi Inc. So seems like Fedi Inc's Obi just made monetary donations to Fedimint.

Good take on the trade offs part, but you can run a fedimint without the bitcoin wallet, lightning, or ecash features. In this way you can do other interesting federated things like have a password manager. Or a nostr account with federated keys/signing.

Any solution that need custody will be as good as the protocol and the custodians/guardians. Yes there could be some good alternative non-bitcoin related use cases, I haven't explored them. I understand m of n digital signatures, I am not sure if m of n decryption is also a thing, but it should be doable, and may be that what it uses.

Fedimint seems to trade federate custody for low to no fees and privacy guarantees. I think low/no fees and privacy is the key benefit as of now. I think it may be short term, because at present I feel privacy is possible and Fedimint will be an important tool in that space for a while. In future, it will be very hard to have privacy.