Oddbean

I fully agree. I also now believe, thanks to talking to a few people and broadening my opinions on ecash, is that it's just a temporary holding. You shouldn't use it for large amounts or for large periods of time. Use it to peg in and out almost immediately. Could you still get rugged? Absolutely. But if you only keep your funds in the custodian for 60 seconds, you're probably going to be okay.

so it is private, depending on the goodwill and honesty of the mint, which might be a honeypot, or rug pulling. Trust third parties, don't verify seems to be the new future of finance. i do not understand this generation of bitcoiners anymore, maybe they got one vaccination too many...

iirc the mint can see your ip address and lightning payments received of course, but cannot tie any amount to any particular token because the mint is blinded. If you make a lightning payment to someone outside of the mint (as opposed to trading the ecash token itself - most private way to use it) the mint can see the invoice amount and the receiver as well. So if the mint receives a specific lightning payment for X amount and immediately after the mint is being asked to exchange some ecash to make a lightning payment for ~X amount it is very likely the same person. That's why it's best to stay awhile (to put as many transactions that could've been you in between your deposit and withdrawal) and not withdraw a similar amount that you deposited (need to use tor or a good vpn too)

but that exposes to more rug pulling risk when you have to wait longer. also, if i understand it correctly, they can log the ip for the token they give you and they can log the ip whom the person who redeems the tokens to lightning. so they dont know the amount but who transferred it to whom, correct?

You're 100% right both are at odds. The longer you wait the more you expose yourself to rug pulls. But if privacy and anonymity is your goal it's better to wait. Good question. I think the only thing a mint knows is if a token is valid (or not) and all ip addresses that interact with it, but not necessarily what specific tokens your ip address is associated with since token creation is blinded if I understand correctly. This FAQ has a lot of our questions in it: https://docs.cashu.space/faq#general-safety-and-privacy-questions

Thank you. TLDR, need to read it completely later. So how do i have to understand that? You have a wallet or a website you interact with, it displays you the ecash string, it has to have the ability to log that string. I dont say it does but you have the ability to create the client in that way that it can log it, no? Also really funny for me ( from the faq): CAUTION: Choose mints where you trust or know and trust the operator. Use small amounts or immediately redeem tokens or swap tokens to your own mint. Who the fuck says openly: "Hi, i am Joe Schmock, i am your friendly ecash operator running this Mint, i live in 123 Retardvillage. If you want to arrest me, just come by, i have not learned anything from the Tornado cash lawsuit. Apart from that, use my tokens so you can buy drugs anonymously online. Love to you all. " Am i getting something completely wrong here or are they delusional?

No, you're not delusional, it is definitely a concern. Users will be more willing to trust known mint runners with a good reputation, but that makes the mints easier targets for the state. Anon mint runners would be harder to find, but easier for them to rugpull users without consequence. The arguments I hear are that federated mints would at least make it harder to rug users, ability to quickly spin up/move mints to better jurisdictions, and to only keep spending cash on it them - not large amounts you can't afford to lose. Even though I think the strong privacy/offchain/instant aspects of ecash is cool the major problem I have a hard time getting past is reintroducing trusted intermediates again when the whole point of Bitcoin was to remove them

Totally, trusting a FEDerated mint is like trusting the FED. There are also a bunch of people i dont know who say they only have my wellbeing in mind and i should trust them. Where is the difference? I have read the page you sent me and i have played around with ecash, what i do not understand at all - you get a string from a mint, send it to somebody else and he goes to the mint and pastes that string into a textarea on the mints website. So the mint can log the ip of who gets the string and the ip of who redeems the string and where is the great privacy in that? Also the faq you sent me did not answer this question to me.

Sure you can do that. But the more hoops you need to jump through in order to get privacy, the more points of failure you have and the more likely it is that you make a mistake over time. And having to trust a third party for privacy is a mistake in the first place IMO.

FYI Dandelion only protects you from other nodes that are communicating and only if you are running your own node. It doesn't protect you from your ISP. So, you still need Tor/Proxies/VPNs/Mixnets to protect you from your ISP and/or if you're using a remote node

So this is how I understand it. Hopefully I can explain it correctly. Everything is still encrypted like normal of course. Dandelion only protects you from malicious nodes on the network knowing what node broadcasted a transaction. But your ISP would still know you were the one who broadcasted a transaction (they still wouldn't be able to see amounts/receivers). Does that make sense?

Not sure, but all you have to do to protect yourself from your ISP is use Tor or at least a good VPN. But even if you didn't, all they would know is you used Monero. They wouldn't know how much Monero you sent or who received it.

Start9 will run monerod over TOR and is setup using the community marketplace. You then connect your client to your start9 server. https://github.com/kn0wmad/monerod-startos/blob/master/docs/guides.md/monero-gui.md

any way you slice it, hopping in an out will expose the user to timing attacks which degrade privacy. and waiting around to defeat the timing attacks exposes the user to rugpull risk. there isnt a good solution here.