Oddbean

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.