“Ecash is the fastest way to send money on the internet” - Robin Linus, creator of BitVM and BitStream.
He’s right. With Pay-to-Pubkey in Cashu, we can even get to payment speeds almost as fast as data packages traveling through the network. The receiver Carol creates a public key and shares it with the sender Alice. Before sending money, the Alice prepares her ecash with one round-trip to the mint to lock it to the pub key of the receiver Carol. The sender Alice now has ecash that can only be spent by Carol (or by herself after a time lock).
That way, we can send ecash from Alice to Carol over the network without the Carol having to make another round trip with the mint to know whether the ecash she received was already spent. If it is locked to her pub key (which she can immediately check) and if the mint has provided a valid signature (which she can check as well), the transaction is final.
Ultrafast payments like these should take a couple of milliseconds if the network is fast enough.
Could chaumian ecash be used as a voting system?
Absolutely. It's the state of the art for anonymous voting systems.
Nice 🤙 Has there been any implementations of it used IRL?
Would it work by limiting each wallet to a single token for example and giving voters different addresses to send to to register their vote?
Can cash now generate Nostr's lightning wallet address?
Don't forget that the mint needs to be a reputable one too. So Carol needs to check the mint against a trust list too.
How would you change NIP-57 to add ecash zaps? Making zaps faster would be very useful
Not true. If you make a system that is the same, but without the blinding step and using an HMAC from the server instead of a signature then it will be faster.
if you make the internet faster as well
HMAC sacrifices the bearer nature of eCash, since you can no longer verify that the mint signed it
I can't possibly think he was being serious but maybe he was!
What’s the privacy like vs on-chain and lightning?
It’s important to mention, however, that payments are not the same as settlements.