Question for nostr:npub12rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sf485vg and others who work on ecash mints: is this kind of thing potentially useful for you guys (see linked post at the end)?

The reason I'm unsure needs unpacking: first, I've always been lukewarm on ecash as a generalized money (see my old London talk on the topic for a 2 hour expansion on that :) ), but I think both that the technology is really cool, and that there are niche use cases where it probably fits very well. So part the obvious reason for being lukewarm is the trust in the mint and that, even if you can figure out any kind of audit of reserves that makes sense, it wouldn't *in itself* prevent the possibility of absconding with user funds. Still, that doesn't mean auditing is useless; it could function as a stabilizer (and .. you can make various arguments).

So, given that context, my suggestion of this kind of *private* audit of reserves is, I can imagine there being a future where mints have to be purely pseudonymous to some or other degree, to avoid attack by the state, albeit this makes trusting them complicated. In that case, it would not be ideal if audits of reserves actually showed a blockchain fingerprint. The advantage of the private-proof-of-taproot-assets protocol I described there is, its' super fast to verify so it should in theory be really easy for the mint's clients to check it. (as opposed to other ZKP techniques which could be super cumbersome here).

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