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 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. 


 
 

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