910 sats \ 26 replies \ @Scoresby 30 May \ on: Summarizing my thoughts on ecash bitcoin
You might use bitcoin to buy monero. When you do this no one says the monero community is custodying your bitcoin in any way. You are trading btc for xmr.
Now, why is it not the case that you can use bitcoin to buy ecash tokens from a particular mint? Why do you call this transaction custody?
Perhaps because the mint plays the role of creating tokens and in the popular implementations (cashu and fedimint) only creates tokens when it receives btc.
Let's say you use btc to buy ecash tokens from another user. In thid case who is custodying the bitcoin? Especially if you pay them btc to an independent wallet they control.
In all these cases you trade one coin for a different coin with different properties. It's up to you to decide whether the trade is worth it for you.
In both cases you trade one coin for a different coin with different properties
Wrong. ecash is not a "coin". Is a cryptographic IOU.
A FUCKING GIFT CARD.
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IMHO: yes, kind of, are not even shitcoins, are IOUs.
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To me, the ecash conversation would become much more fruitful if we get past the idea that they are custodying anything. Can they be useful to bitcoiners or are they a distraction? Bitcoiners would have a much easier time sorting this out if they did not think the mint was somehow agreeing to custody their btc for them. Why would you ever give up btc if you didn't expect to get something in return? What is a mint giving you when you give them btc and is it worth the cost?
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I consider ecash as quick solution to onboard the "poor man" that cannot afford a full UTXO to open a LN channel for himself.
Kind of a more fancy way to use WoS. In the end is the same custodial shit.
The important thing is to educate these poor "entry" users that should not keep using ecash forever and redeem their "trapped" sats from ecash into real LN channels or onchain UTXOs.
One thing is very clear: ecash tokens are NOT sats! Are just IOUs.
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Hard to say. Depends on each wallet app and our guides :)
I see a lot pushing this ecash without educating well the users BEFORE use. And that is wrong.
I am using ecash, for testing purpose only and learn more about it, so I will not speak just for the sake of speaking. But I do not consider it as the "ultimate" solution for scaling Bitcoin or more privacy. Privacy do not stand in multiple mumbo jumbo mental gymnastics and added protocols. First of all you have to know WHO you really are so you will know what is private and what is public.
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"Do users understand"..... ???
I wish we would stop talking about eCash in public at all. It's gotta be confusing the shit out of regular users.
I see ecash as a technical layer in a larger protocol. In any Mint-based App, the user should simply see how many Sats they have. They do not need to know that it's really eCash.
I have not used Fedimint yet, but I've done a lot of reading on it. I'm praying as hard as I can to Odin himself that when I open the Fedi app for the first time I DO NOT SEE ANY MENTION OF ECASH! I hope the devs are not that stupid. It's part of the protocol, but it should be abstracted away from users just like the layers of the internet, and even fiat banks, are abstracted away from the users. Just show me my Sat balance and let me send it cheaply, privately, and fast, for fuck's sake.
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What's the difference between a coin and an IOU?
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You are trading btc for xmr.
The difference here is that Monero is it's own, stand-alone currency with powerful privacy features. It's not an IOU for anything, it has all of it's own properties. BTC <-> XMR is a currency exchange, while depositing Bitcoin at a mint to get ecash is being given an IOU that is worthless if the underlying Bitcoin disappears.
Who will take ecash from a mint that has no Bitcoin to back it? As opposed to Monero, where it has it's own direct value and has thousands of merchants and users directly accepting it.
Ecash is not a "coin" it's an IOU. Those are wildly different things and are not comparable.
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The difference here is that Monero is it's own, stand-alone currency with powerful privacy features
Literally no difference. You're nit picking because you have XMR bags. It's so funny watching you walk around in circles around this. You're literally giving up custody of Bitcoin to hold a shitty asset that's heading to zero.
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To be fair, a cashu ecash mint does suffer from a single point of failure, in a way that monero does not. I don't know enough about monero to say whether a fedimint with something like 7 guardians is closer to the cashu side of things or the monero side. But I think it's a valid point that mints are generally susceptible to servers going offline while that's not really a concern with something like monero.
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whether a fedimint with something like 7 guardians is closer to the cashu side of things or the monero side
That's an argument for spectrums of decentralized. You can say a network is more decentralized or less decentralized than another network.
At the end of the day, they're the same thing. A DLT network.
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No you just don't like my responses because they don't fit your narrative. As seen in your strawman reply instead of a real response.
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Yeah bro post more fake screenshots of fake quotes from politicians to try to defend your XMR bags and bash privacy tech.
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wut lol
Dude, take a step back and calm down. We don't have to both love the same custodial tools to be reasonable and actually have conversations.
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I've responded at length to that, many times. It's an asinine take that is dangerous and disingenuous and will lead to people hating Bitcoin because they think Bitcoin lost their money when it was really a malicious mint or a gov rug pull.
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Literally no difference? You can take custody of your Monero, and the network is decentralized, but ecash tokens are without value once the mint is taken over.
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You take custody of the ecash notes too. How much value is xmr when a 51% attack happens and the network is useless?
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ecash notes don't have any value without the trusted party!!
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You realize with fedimint, it is a decentralized network?
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When btc and xmr were just getting started, there were not thousands of merchants and users.
The major difference that I can see between your definition of coin and an IOU seems to be usefulness. Btc doesn't have intrinsic value, it has value because people think it's properties are useful. Same with xmr. No reason ecash cannot be the same.
The weakest part if me saying ecash are altcoins is this: if the mint turns off its servers, poof no more ecash. I don't think this means it is not a coin, though. Stable coins all seem to have this property. Do you think tether is an IOU?
Are all stablecoins custodial?
Even if they are, I think that talking about ecash with an altcoin model is more honest than telling people it's custodial bitcoin.
Who will take ecash from a mint that has no Bitcoin to back it?
It would be interesting to think about what an ecash token that overtly fractionally reserved would trade at. Or, for that matter, an ecash token that was interoperable with lightning but used something else in it's treasury. Shares of community owned land? Shares of a company?
I'm in agreement with you that ecash is not bitcoin. But this does not mean it's a useless idea.
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Do you think tether is an IOU?
Yeah, it's literally an IOU for dollars.
Even if they are, I think that talking about ecash with an altcoin model is more honest than telling people it's custodial bitcoin.
As I said, I think it's disingenuous to pretend that ecash is not custodial, as the asset people care about is Bitcoin, not the IOU on top of it. No one would accept ecash that wasn't fully redeemable for Bitcoin as then it's literally a worthless credential. That is far different than altcoins which have their own incentive structures and are far more resilient than ecash.
I'm in agreement with you that ecash is not bitcoin. But this does not mean it's a useless idea.
I don't necessarily think it's a useless idea, but that it's useless to pursue for Bitcoin payments because of the broken incentives etc. that I mentioned. All previous ecash attempts have failed because they undermine the state and are trivial to shut down, and the latest take on ecash is no different (except that it's backed by an asset that is under intense scrutiny from the US gov). The reason I push so hard against it is because it's inevitable that this either ends in users rugged and trust broken, killing ecash as an idea, or gov rugs and trust broken, killing ecash as an idea.
To me it's a concept that is technically fascinating and I want to love, but one that clearly has no future in the world we live in today. Once we overthrow our oppressors and have more just laws it's another story, and community banking via ecash would probably be a good tool in that potential future.
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There is a distinction to be made between the resilience of a system that is just starting out and one that has been around for a while. Be it tether, monero or bitcoin, all were trivial to shut down in their infancy. They are much less so now. It's an interesting thought how trivial it would be for a gov to shut down tether. Certainly worlds easier than btc and xmr, but also probably not trivial.
I'm still quite confused why anyone would trade sats for ecash if what they wanted in the end was the same sats. Why make such a trade in the first place?
For me, I expect to get something for such a trade, and I expect to pay a price. Perhaps the ability to do certain kinds of transactions I can't currently do with btc.
Some folks say ecash's only benefit is privacy. I see more than that: LN still has difficulty delivering on a internet of micropayments. Ecash solves some of these problems (offline receive, need to run a LN node). For example, websites like SN might be able to navigate the trade offs between usability and regulation if they use ecash instead of custody.
We both agree that in the beautiful future all these things might work or at least we will be able to reason about them more clearly. In the unpleasant regulatory mess we currently inhabit, especially in the US, I still wonder if ecash as an altcoin has more usefulness than ecash as custodial bitcoin.
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Bingo.
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