Oddbean new post about login | logout ok, my pea brain just had an epiphany reading this: the only reason to put bitcoin in a company is because i anticipate a return on it! otherwise i would just hold the bitcoin. Is a lightning channel the only example of "decentralized" finance that's truly software/decentralized and not subject to human intervention?
No, also mints. Could probably earn money running an eCash mint.
I mean, everything except Bitcoin is human-intervened. ECash more than Lightning.
do you think Ecash mints and lightning channels will become like banks in the future? like will a bank today just have an ecash mint and lightning channel in the future?
Also, a vault and issuing certificates for reserve audits. That sort of thing. Back to the roots.
a vault! with one of those big doors i get excited when thinking about Bitcoin cash as in paper money that is like bitcoin. I personally don't like intermediating every purchase by looking at a phone, especially in foreign countries where I'm struggling with SPanish or something. it just needs a private bank to issue it, whose reserves are auditable on the mempool.space. and each printed note would be a claim on the private bank's bitcoin. Over time someone might lose their satoshi notes, so the reserve would slowly grow larger than the supply of actual notes. https://image.nostr.build/e204d17399885e733d38dd0bfc9c8a151c8d04c192ec8210cb22c8e944490615.jpg
And bank locked boxes. Someplace to save your valuables. I think some also offer multisig services for companies and trusts, so that there's always an impartial person approving transactions. And notary services.
yes, as a renter in an old place that's already been water damaged once, I need this.
We already have paper wallets, actually. That used to be really popular.
And you can print Lightning eCash on paper.
ok, i will look into eCash. i think what i'm looking for is just dollar bills/local currency for now. but fast forward 10 years, and it will be interesting to see how it's done because I really don't want to carry around a phone in the future.
Yeh ... physical bitcoin cash notes would be handy
yeah, how would they look... would they have some little RFID circuits printed under the surface to match it with database at the bank that issued them. authenticity could be verified with a phone NFC(API to regulated portal that checks serial number against banks issued paper and BTC holdings) . ownership is just whose hand is holding it.
I wonder if it's possible to cryptographically give a serial number to one piece of paper that couldn't be counterfeited
pretty much has to be profitable to run an ecash mint, or nobody will do it
Well, you can run one for your company to pay the employees, or something. Or for friends and family.
yeah, the idea is to have many of them and for them to have an exchange connecting them so payments from one mint can be redeemed by another with minimal human intervention the ontology of their mechanism of operation does also mean that they can only really scale up to a certain size of userbase before the complexity of the relationships exceeds practicality and lightning is a perfect way to enable the inter-mint exchanging so yeah, i agree, ecash mints will perform an important task, and will be pretty cool for a while until it gets really popular and you get "wildcat mints" and politicians, with no visible prompting *sarcasm* offer to "certify" mints hopefully by that point we have obsoleted banking institutions and their shadowy influence on government
Yeah, Bitcoin doesn't generate returns directly, as it isn't an interest-bearing note. It's a commodity, like gold. You can put Bitcoin or gold or copper or USD bills, or whatever into a company reserve and the company earns money through its business and you earn returns from the business.
