Oddbean new post about login | logout A cashu mint can create sats without locking actual Bitcoin (Fake Wallet https://github.com/cashubtc/nutshell/blob/f32099bce7ecca54338ebc1a551883fbdb883af2/cashu/lightning/fake.py#L31). So the zaps you receive may or may not be real, i.e. convertible to Lightning sats. So you should either zap those sats onwards, or withdraw to a real wallet asap (claim from the mint). It this thing takes on and there will be lots and lots of such (potentially fake) sats on Nostr, this will inflate Bitcoin supply and damage it's reputation when many sats turn out unclaimable. TLDR I hate this shitcoinery.
yes. this is 100% by design and intentional for a sovereign mint operator. the cashu spec doesnt require backing by sats, nor does it require the operator to fullfill outbound payment requests
this should not consensus in the ways of Satoshi #ProofOfWork
I'm glad someone else see this shitcoinery.
This isn't shitcoinery. It's a legit method to possibly evolve the ecosystem. With that said though, I agree that there needs to always be actual sats backing any ecash transaction. Also need redundancy in the ecash mints. Could there be a way maybe to require ecash mints be in clusters of 4. So that the (4) in the cluster are each clones of one another. With the sats being held in a multisig wallet, so that 2 of the 4 mint clones hold the same multisig key and the other 2 mint clones hold the other multisig key. I guess this would make it a separate layer 2 network completely separate from lightning though.
How can you be sure that the sats in your WoS or Alby wallet are real before you spend them? How can you be sure that you will be able to spend your BTC on a centralized exchange tomorrow? Same with mint, you are not sure, except you are not expected to keep any valuable amount on a mint, once you have 5000, 10000, 50'000sats on a mint, transfer it to Phoenix, Breez, Zeus or your full node with lightning, then when you have 100'000, 500'000, 1Msats on Lightning that you don't need for spending, swap it on-chain on a cold storage with key properly secured. It's just a matter of habits and education.
Sure, I don't use custodial wallets except SN (to lightning address), and I auto withdraw to my node. But at least Wos, Alby, etc are large centralized entities. A mint can be spun up easily by anyone, and they are mostly anonymous.
I think at this point that we can stop using the argument of too big to fail, everyone use it so it's safe, they are large entities we can trust them (oops: MtGox, eBTC, FTX, Celsius, Credit Suisse bank!). Anyone can decide which mint use and trust for a few sats of change. Use mint of a dev you like, a big company or associations, someone met at a local meetup, a friends, family or your own. I respect that you want to stay as close as possible to the core Bitcoin experience and ecosystem, in the beggining Lightning was rejected as not real bitcoins, now only a few purist would argue that Lightning should not be used and everytjng must stay on-chain, maybe cashu will become part of the Bitcoin ecosystem and accepted by the majority for some use cases or maybe a better solution will be found on Lightning that avoid larger fee to manage liquidity before accepting your first 21 sats as zap without relying on a couple of big centralized entities.
"at least they are large centralized entities"