Oddbean

There is a nip for which mints you recommend, but not one for which mint you use (which has many privacy implications) There is a danger of feedback loop, yes, however keep in mind that your trending mints are going to be different, and possibly very different from mines, because it's personalised! I agree community helps with these things, totally. Another aspect to consider is that in the future reputation is going to become much more important, so who you give your attention to or who you recommend is going to be used to judge you. Trending towards anarchy requires personal responsibility and stricter societal norms, so I agree with you pointing out these problems, but I think they will become smaller in the future (still a lot of work to solve them in a convincing way)

> your trending mints are going to be different, and possibly very different from mines, because it's personalised! Why? I don't see much proof of this. 1. Mints are very different from content, relays, niche services, ... Unlike with those, there's very little design space for them to be anything else than a commodity. 2. Without the mint auth'ing you (and thus turning it into a bi-directional relationship), what's stopping most users from just going with the fastest, cheapest, hardest one? What exactly breaks that centralizing feedback loop? Hard-coding apps to stay away from mints that have over XXX reserves? Then you probably end up with the same centralization, just more hidden across "different" mints. 3. Me and you using the same mint is the cheapest, most friction-less option. Scale that to all the other profiles in our networks and the incentives are there for us all to use the same mint. This is why I'm interested in solutions that by default limit a mint's scope to groups of people explicitly trusting each other in some way. I don't see many other decentralizing forces besides that.

I think mints are similar to relays. Using few big relays is fastest, and if we all do it there is very low probability of missing some posts. Same with mints, if we use few big ones it's fastest and we have lower fees (as most transactions would be intra-mint). However, if we look at the current distribution of users per relay it's pretty good (plot from nostr.band) Why is that? The advantage of using multiple relays is lower probability of censorship. Similarly, the advantage of using multiple mints is lower probability of rugs. Also, with mints there is an anti-centralisation influence, because you don't want to use the biggest mints as there is more chance of big rugs from the gov or hacks. So I would say there is decent evidence that the distribution of mints will be more flat than that of relays. https://image.nostr.build/9e05dbd414118bb74e9b0d1e43bd8cffede8db74bf0649350081f64bc5de725b.jpg

a post on potential user-per-mints distribution nostr:nevent1qqs0dkg6hn3tl9lnkgwdqrnyqxlte7ncf30kulelusqk5tzz0qr8h7gpzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuurjd9kkzmpwdejhgtczyrmg86rsxhm66n6yuzuce77e2dlpv326jtxn3nhufje3md640a00yqcyqqqqqqgwyvnch

> the advantage of using multiple mints is lower probability of rugs Why? I get the part that only 20% of your nuts got stolen if you have 5 mints and 1 of them rugs. But what do you do after that happens? Add a new commodity mint that can do the same exact thing? Add 10 more mints you don't know anything about? Spend significant time comparing and picking mints, that all are still incentivized to rug you? Who does any of that after being robbed?