yes, the mint fee is to compensate for the work it does.
If two people are paying each other across mints, then they'll pay for the mint fees + lightning fees
To understand why let's look at the steps involved in a normal transaction.
1) Alice has an ecash banknote on MintA
2) Alice sends it Bob
At this point, both Alice and Bob own the ecash banknote. This is problematic, because Bob wants to have unilateral control of that banknote.
To do that Bob
3) Request a new banknote from MintA. MintA invalidate the old banknote, and gives a new one to Bob, that only he owns.
So to prevent MintA being DDoS attacked, MintA charges a fee for every request.
So on step (3), the mint cannot do stuff like "rate limit" the amount of re-assignments that happen on the "same" banknote?
Auth is obviously a no-go.
And the mint wants to make money, so yup I get it.
Sucks for the UX tho.
Paying ⚡22 to zap ⚡21 isn't the same 😿
Maybe it's possible, but it is quite complex because the mint would have to track how many times a "chain of banknotes" is moved around, and I am not sure if that's compatible with "pay to npub" types of tx, which work differently.
Even if possible, that's too complex imo.
It seems strange that zaps are free, and that cashu, charges. I agree it's going to be tough on the UX. My point is more around letting people try the system first, get used to it (like with zaps), before adding the complexity of transaction fees.
Yup agreed!
mSat fees are a lot more elegant + align incentives better
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