Oddbean

I noticed “E-cash disrespectoor” in your bio @captain ☦️ compromised I’m still trying to form an opinion. I had a call with someone yesterday who shared some skepticism on eCash with me. Can you tell me more about your view?

My view is very simple: not your keys, not your bitcoin. Calling these e-cash tokens self custodial is the biggest cope I've seen. If you keep up with @shocknet_justin and @Car you'll get a good idea of where I'm coming from.

my stance on ecash is on the latest ep on SNL, @dk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyCicFzd3SA&list=PLKnVil22cJNzDABNpAQ2JecRzU3SUtV8V frankly I am tired of talking about it atp, let the builders build

Hope @captain ☦️ compromised or @Car will discuss ecash and their concerns in public with me at Nashville. I am running the Bitcoin Veterans workshops and would be happy to have an open forum discussion. We can get as technical as you'd like.

Thanks, I’m following both of them now, too. I’ve always had the assumption that a payment for a good/service always has counter-party risk with whoever you’re exchanging with. So I would never consider eCash self-custodial, but I’ve always thought of it more like a simplified UX involving an additional party for an already somewhat risky transaction. You could give me 10,000 sats from cold storage and I might still run away with the coffee we had agreed I’d hand over in exchange.

This rationale highlights my issues with it Custody of small amounts (credit) is inevitable in an economic sense, but ECash isn't additive to that at all, while ECashers position them as synonymous despite solving the wrong problems inhibiting broader adoption of Bitcoin as a MoE It's not more programmable than any other database, it's actually much worse because of the the abstraction from the underlying asset The privacy benefits are farcical, particularly in the context of small nodes, and treating it as a new payment spec is deleterious to interoperability If the goal is to have shared friends and family nodes for Bitcoin as a MoE, then Lightning.Pub is superior to mints in every way

I think fedimint/e-cash sounds like a good solution for scaling. Yes, it requires trust, but it’s a community of people you know and so theft will have consequences. It’s for spending amounts, not saving amounts. That said, I’ve not had the opportunity to try it.

First and foremost, Calle has been very clear that onchain, self custodial bitcoin is the best. He is also clear that ecash is not self custodial. Full stop. That principled stance is important. Next is that too many people are worried about what other people do with their property. Every single ecash wallet I have tried ( nearly all of them ) have numerous warnings about ecash being beta and not to risk large amounts. Seems like the people who are scared of the tech haven't even used it or interacted much with the devs. Behind the scenes these builders are providing incredible customer support including zapping users as bugs occur. Mint operators have all given as bold of public disclosures about mints shutting down. No rugs have occurred and trust is being built through transparency. Furthermore, I believe that lots of criticism is coming from those who already may have meaningful amounts of bitcoin. For those with no sats, ecash is the easiest way to receive small amounts of sats. It is the only solution to onboard people when a lightning channel is a minimum 100k sats. My experience is that ecash removed the friction of kyc custodial lightning wallets ( a greater risk in my opinion), allowed receiving of small sats, gave ability to zap devs, worked to accumulate enough zaps to open a self custodial lightning channel in Mutiny thus verifying the miny was vaild. New nostr users with no sats need to move down the layers not up!