Yeah, the simple things pop out, often after years of hard study. I realized that Bitcoin was no different than the reserve settlement systems, other than nobody is in charge. Lightning is like the depository systems that hold collateral, like overnight loans.
And ecash is just like regular cash - a transferable credit note.
In the earlier private banking systems ‘cash’ had numerous private issuers. It worked (still works) really well, until,someone got the bright idea we needed central banks.
If I can issue and keep track of my own credit notes and can clear out to Lightning, I don’t need to use a mint. I am my own mint.
How is credit to yourself useful? It's all in the same book, so any credit to yourself is automatically cancelled out by the debit. Maybe I'm missing something?
It’s not useful for myself. But it’s useful when I am testing and I am rugging myself. However, since it is a bearer instrument, if I send it to someone else, it suddenly becomes a liability.
So you're thinking of it as a simpler and custodial forms of payment channels perhaps? E.g. I wouldn't immediately cash your zaps, but keep them for a while, and efficiency increases if I then cash them in all at once later?
Exactly. If those ecash tokens are encumbered to me, I can wait until I accumulate an amount before I clear out.
Few years ago on a podcast I shared how I use lightning to "borrow" against my UTXO's to acquire more Bitcoin, all self-custodial with no counter party risk*
Been working for years.
*nothing is perfect in this regard (except for cold storage priv keys) but this is the closest thing we have imo
can U share a link to podcast?
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