ratel on Nostr: Good write up, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a layer 3. Since mints simply use ...

Good write up, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a layer 3. Since mints simply use lightning as connecting tissue. Meaning that, mints have LN channels to settle balances with each other or peers in the LN. User of cashu, can deposit sats via LN and then the mint will issue a token with exactly the same amount in return. This token can then be sent or exchange free d between users literally at the speed of light (since there are no LN routing nodes involved). However, one important thing to point out that you missed is that the token is the money. So the mint does not know what account balance a user has or any payment details. Instead users can store there tokens anywhere or send their tokens to anyone, e.g. via email. As you can imagine, this makes cashu way more private then LN payments. Because users who want to redeem cashu at a mint simply have to connect to it and trust it. Interestingly, the mint will not know where this cashu came from or who it was issued originally to, since mints blindly cashu when issuing or authenticating them.