Oddbean

Thank you for your question. Here is my perception: Liquid - 🟠 All fee goes to Liquid Functionaries (15) - 🟠 Any combination of 5 functionaries can paralyze the Liquid - 🔴 After two weeks (I think) can Blockstream steal all the Liquid funds - 🔴 Liquid is vulnerable to governments Ecash - 🟢Fees are decentralized - 🔴 Any mint can steal the funds - 🟢But there can be huge competition - anyone can run a mint - 🟢 Users can withdraw their funds anytime - immediately → unchain or on lightning - 🟢 Ecash brings new value → can be shared with anyone - without previous action - for example via message - 🟢 It enables simple interaction with Lightning Network

Simplified view could be that: - Liquid is like new central banking - Ecash is like new free banking Both have advantages and disadvantages. And I’m a strong advocate of free banking in this dilemma. But real bitcoin is best of course.

All the properties you like in ecash exist for liquid (apart from stealing funds). The above tutorial is a literal example of easy swapping to LN, same is possible for onchain. On your liquid points. Fees going to functionaries is decentralised. Liquids federation is one of the best that has ever existed, many millions went into this process (custom hw, geographically seperate - because that's what needs to happen for a federation to work). Liquid is far less vulnerable to governments, its cryptographically has proof of reserves, ecash does not, so is producing currency - a crime govs hate above all others.

It's like saying wooohoo, I can run a dark market and there is nothing you can do govs 🖕 The technology exists to do that thing, but for the sake of one custodial "improvement" privacy, it's a lot of risk. Just run your own phoenixd or use liquid and boltz 🤷🏼, privacy with no rug pulls or jail 🤗

I don’t see the direct link to my points. 1. Fees go to Functionaries, right? Or maybe to Federation members, but it doesn’t make huge difference.. 2. I agree that Liquid federation might be the best federation in the space, but still. Any 5 of them can steal all the funds. If government will push, they can do whatever they want with Liquid - and all the locked bitcoin. 3. Ecash is not that mature and anyone can steal there.. But we can build tools to make it inefficient. And it can be way more resilient.

1. This was a benefit of ecash you made "fees are decentralised", it's also true for liquid. 2. That's why great care was taken to make the federation is geographically seperate. The lag of regulating gives the federation time to adjust. 3. True of any technology in bitcoin, Liquid included.

1. I would argue that Liquid fees are not decentralized. 2. Government attacks can be fast without supporting legislation. See samurai or tornado cash cases as an example. 3. True, but I still think that Liquid is more vulnerable. It’s only few entities. With e-cash it can be simply hundreds of thousands. That doesn’t apply to Liquid (it wouldn’t scale than…)