Oddbean new post about login | logout That's 18 months of thinking about ecash, and trying my hardest to see it's relevance for widespread payments.
Offline asynchronous payments. I can dm you ecash via nostr (or whatever) when you are offline. I can sign it with your public key and send it in cleartext. You can redeem it when you're back online. I could put it on a thumb drive and hand it to you in person. Can't with lightning.
What’s the benefit over trusting my peer with a bolt 12 hodl invoice?
Besides being available now, I would also like to know this. One idea I'm thinking about is whether as a bearer instrument it is possible to "relieve" oneself of the cash, for it to be passed around as "money" without having to use the mint to destroy/issue it. I can, of course, sign it to you with your pubkey, but that doesn't prevent me from cashing it at the mint (it only prevents others from doing so). I can use the mint to redeem and reissue it to you, but then we're still using the mint. So it would require me to "prove" I've never opened an encrypted thing, without the help of the mint (and offline, for that matter). Maybe another use case is a temporary ID inside a virtual environment. You pay to "enter" and get a token to use inside that environment. Cound be porn, gambling, games, while giving you privacy. Or it could be something to make you honest or civil in a particular environment, like a bond. It's also easy to federate, so it may be better than lightning for quorum decisions or voting, with anonymity. I think it may come down to being used as coinjoin-type obfuscation, or in another way to evade antiquated regulations or bypass legal technicalities.
But you can zap someone with Lightning when they are offline too, no? I wake up and have new zaps in my wallet. I didnt have to accept them.
He's talking about the node. If the node is out of reach for some reason he can give you the token and you will redeem it when it's back up. Example you go to a store to pay, the store LN service is down or the store has no net, the store might accept the ecash and redeem it when it gets online again.
I have to take your word for it in regards to the technical security. But it still looks like a mint runs on top of a lightning wallet, which has the risks of screwing up something and losing lightning funds *and* the risk of screwing up the mint (I have lost small amounts to mint bugs or operator error). It never occurred to me that custodial lightning wallet could lie about "issuance". I suppose they could in a Ponzi kind of way, siphoning funds as a "slow rug". I think you have a point. I'm trying to think through some of the privacy and anti- censorship benefits. If there's a list somewhere or a podcast where you discussed it, I'm very interested. I'm very optimistic, but also don't see it as a scaling panacea. https://primal.net/e/note1gwev8mgqf7x0wms94mw4l0knm79s3l00lh99dc7wctfxknsdfpts7tlxxk