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2025-01-24 19:32:22

cmd on Nostr: Can someone sell me on why running an ecash mint is better than a vanilla custodial ...

Can someone sell me on why running an ecash mint is better than a vanilla custodial lightning service?

- Each ecash transaction must go through the mint to change hands, so the server can see everything and strongly correlate your payments anyway.

- You have to backup and store your coins or they are forever lost. The mint can backup your state, but that further strengthens the above.

- You have to use an ecash wallet instead of just a vanilla lightning wallet. A custodial wallet can have zero state, while an ecash wallet has to manage a lot of state. An ecash mint also has to bridge lightning payments if other users want to pay in lightning.

The plus side I guess is that the mint doesn't have to worry about strict accounting, while a custodial lightning server does. And there is some privacy benefits, but it's a complex subject and far from anonymous.

Please help me understand the use-case for ecash. I don't care about politics or the regulatory bogeyman, I just want to throw up a custodial wallet service that does its job with minimal friction. I want to have great user experience and ease of deployment (for others to fork my service).
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npub1gg5uy8cpqx4u8wj9yvlpwm5ht757vudmrzn8y27lwunt5f2ytlusklulq3