1574 sats \ 2 replies \ @dpc 30 May \ on: Summarizing my thoughts on ecash bitcoin
Ad 1. Run your own mint for your family, friends and communities. Setting up a federation will eventually be as easy as setting up a WiFi router at home.
Ad 2&5 If you "own" a house, but government can take it away if you stop paying taxes that they arbitrarily set, do you really own it? Or is it really in the custody of your government? So if most people are forced not to have self-sovereignty over the largest asset they own isn't that much bigger problem then some daily spending money?
The same person can have self-custody of their savings, and use a trusted mint for day to day transactions. I have 99 problems, and payments for my groceries not being fully self-custodial isn't one.
Ad 3.Make sure to check the social backup in Fedi app. Very nifty, IMO. There's lot of UX that can be done on top of pre-existing human connections, and we barely scratched the surface.
Ad 4. There's an incentive for the users to use ecash, especially Federated. It improves the UX, robustness, availability, cost, privacy... the list goes on.
Ad 6. If I wasn't working on Fedimint, I'd probably be working on some distributed databases in Rust. Other contributors would likely be doing something else, not necessarily Bitcoin related. Ecash does not take away from other solutions, and too many cooks spoils the broth. There's a lot of people arguing about opcodes on Bitcoin already. :D
Setting up a federation will eventually be as easy as setting up a WiFi router at home.
How? A useful mint/federation requires a Bitcoin node, a well-capitalized and managed Lightning node, mint software, and a multisig wallet. In what dream world does that become as easy as a plug-and-play router?
If you "own" a house
Huh? How are house mortgages comparable to ecash... Are you trying to argue that because the legacy system is broken it's OK if Bitcoin is broken?
Make sure to check the social backup in Fedi app.
Haven't seen that, will have to check it out!
There's an incentive for the users to use ecash, especially Federated.
Why would WoS users suddenly be OK with dealing with custodying their ecash IOUs when the whole point of WoS to them right now is none of the personal responsibility being necessary?
You only mention users, while the whole point is custodians have to choose to implement this stuff. Why would they?
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How? A useful mint/federation requires a Bitcoin node,
Minimal pruned bitcoind is OK. 12GB of storage currently required.
a well-capitalized and managed Lightning node,
LN Gateway is not trusted and can provided by anyone. I envision that eventually there will be services that provide LN gateway to private Federations for routing fees, after some liquidity is provided. So Federation guardians just register for that service, give it some ecash to have in-Federation liquidity and that's it.
mint software, and a multisig wallet.
Unclear what you mean. The guardians don't need anything else. Users need something like a Fedi or Mutiny app.
The general process is hopefully well described in e.g. instruction: https://github.com/fedimint/nixos-deployment
Eventually it should become even simpler.
You only mention users, while the whole point is custodians have to choose to implement this stuff. Why would they?
Guardians are the users themselves. That's how I think about it. You don't use random federations, or even reputable public federations, at least with any non-trivial amounts. You use a federation that you ideally run in part by yourself with other people you know and trust personally , along with your extended family, friends and close knitted community.
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