Oddbean

Agreed that people shouldn’t store large amounts on LN or Fedimint. Just like I don’t carry life savings in my pocket wallet. Fedimint guardians are the only ones who know the overall liabilities of the mint, while individual users only know their portion. Total assets of the Fedimint are known, but not total liabilities. There are a few different scenarios outlined on the fedimint.org site. https://fedimint.org/docs/TradeOffs/DebasementRisk

Maybe you and I are debating two different things. Fedimints do not increase Bitcoin supply. Fedimints take Bitcoin and turn it into ecash tokens that may be claimed for Bitcoin in the future. Fedimints may make more claims than they have Bitcoin. At that point the Fedimint is fractional reserve on the ecash. Some users will go to claim their Bitcoin and it won’t be there. To an regular user, their Bitcoin is gone.

You are simply using the term fractional reserve 100% wrong. I never said nor has anyone said there was no trust issue here. Perhaps go to ChatGpt or yourube or something and learn what fractional reserve means.

You still sound like you don't have basic definitions. Sign up for this, read every email for a year, then we can try having another conversation. https://www.investopedia.com/term-of-the-day-newsletter-term-a-7551183 Really not being a dick here you are just well, layers do not debase BTC either. https://m.primal.net/JOCE.jpg

I’m always down to learn more and refine understandings I’ve gained over the years. Sounds good. It’s kind of dick to tell someone they are being willfully ignorant when you don’t know anything about that person. I’m clearly not, if I’m willing to engage in a conversation about complex financial topics as they apply to unproven technologies and admit when I need to go back and refine my understanding. Quite the opposite of your assertion. I still listen to your show and am a member of the MSB.

Naw he seems like a good guy. But when you are actively arguing a point and a person says, that is not what this thing means and you keep arguing without checking and you are wrong. You have chosen not to find out and you don't know what you are saying. So you are Willful - actively making a choice Ignorant - lacking specific knowledge on a thing This is always worse when people are repeating what other have said. I always say, trust no one, even me, fact check everything. And there is a reason. To call a man ignorant to a specific thing is not an insult, it is not like calling them stupid. I am ignorant to many things but I don't talk about them like I know about them.

Honestly, to be fair, I know nothing about the guy in the thread, so it wouldn't be fair to single him out. In response to a generally willfully ignorant individual, though, it is the willful part that just grinds my gears. I worked with a group of guys in the tech industry during the Rona; individuals who generally tend to be really smart. These guys would feed off anything the MSM would feed them and attempt to mathematically prove how severe the disease was with the fictitious numbers they received, simply because they refused to question the original sources or think for themselves. Lately, anytime I debunk or deconstruct ignorant claims the counter party essentially refuses any level of continuance for our discussion, and states, "We'll just have to agree to disagree." A week later I heard them lean on the very same deconstructed argument when they were talking with someone else. Almost like our previous conversations have never happened. When I bring it up they get visibly angry. Just touched a nerve, I suppose.

Fractional reserve banking backs the non-reserve fraction with loan assets. Running a mint with deficient reserves, without backing the deficiency with assets, is theft. When you deposit money in a bank account, you are lending money to the bank to earn interest on. Theoretically, they give you banking services and a nominal interest rate in exchange. The bank lends this out, and if those funds wind up back in their own bank, they can lend against this again. If there is a business cycle, everyone loses their jobs and can't pay on the loans, those loans are "forgiven" after the collatoral is liquidated. What is left over is where "natural" inflation comes from. This is the slippery slope of fractional reserve banking, and why they are required to limit their "money printing" with a minimum reserve amount set by regulators (the Fed). When you deposit bitcoin in a fedimint, you are trusting the federation to custody your sats for you, not as a loan, not with promise of paying interest, not with expectation the sats will be invested. The agreement is one of bailment, not banking. If the mint removes the sats from the vault without redeeming fedi tokens, they are breaking the agreement. This is theft. To enforce this agreement in court would be difficult because there is no explicit mechanism to pay a fee to the mint operators for this service, and there is no written contract for services. This is a goodwill agreement, which requires an enormous amount of trust and this may work fine in many situations. Learn what fractional reserve banking means (not you Jack) before equating what a bank does with what Uncle Jim does.

The type of agreement where the bailee is required to maintain a 100% reserve of the fungible goods is known as a "custodial agreement." In this arrangement, the bailee is responsible for keeping the exact amount of the fungible goods in reserve, without using or consuming them, ensuring that the full quantity is always available to the bailor upon demand. This is often used in scenarios involving valuable or sensitive assets that need to be preserved and protected in their entirety.

Yeah. I confused the two concepts because they share similar symptoms of bank run potential. It appears I unknowingly jumped into the middle of a bigger discussion/argument and tried to contribute without knowing the full background. :) Thanks for keeping my terminology in check. I’m a big fan of Fedimints and am continually trying to play out their vulnerabilities and attack vectors so we can find ways to solve them or at least make people fully aware.