human nature and greed will always lead to fractional reserve, i would take a proof of reserve ecash mint over a privacy one. If you could do both that would be even better, but that has similar issues to zcash where you have to hope there isn’t an inflation/supply bug.
How would proof of reserves reduce the privacy of a mint?
from what I’ve read in the past privacy makes proof of reserves harder, maybe that is better now ?
A naive proof would just list all of the pubkeys and their balances and show that it’s backed by an actual utxo.
that's cool
The free market do its thing
we will eventually see mint insurance schemes pop up
Yeah I’m just thinking of the mint I would feel comfortable using (but i run my own nodes so I don’t personally feel like I would ever use one)
If we don’t think about these things we risk rebuilding the existing systems. I don’t buy the argument that it’s all small amounts so it doesn’t matter. It’s small amounts until it isn’t.
I got into bitcoin for the sovereignty and self custody aspects, ecash is really cool as a technology but feels bad to push it to wider adoption. Feels like we are just giving up on self custody. I would like to see more progress on improving L1 script so we don’t have to go the ecash route.
Yeah, really wish we had ecash UX with self custody. Hard tradeoff for now.
I don't think we'll rebuild the existing systems, imo it's worth a try
I see ecash more as a payment instrument for high velocity transactions. Eventually the ecash ends up as a channel balance or UTXO. The mints will be forced to be near 100% reserved because of near perfect liquidity. They’ll make their money by increasing velocity thereby earning more fees.
Does not have to be all or nothing. But it CAN be if you like. The beauty of Bitcoin.
What about federated mints? I could see those allowing for less centralization when used. Similar to liquid.
They are more palatable for sure
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