dikaios1517 on Nostr: Best way to think about it is eCash is an IOU. That IOU can be denominated in ...
Best way to think about it is eCash is an IOU. That IOU can be denominated in anything that the issuer of the IOU agrees on. In this case, it's usually sats.
When you put your sats into an eCash mint, they hold onto your actual sats for you and give you some ecash tokens in exchange. You have to keep those tokens safe, because you can only get your actual sats back, or spend them with someone outside of the mint, by giving those tokens back to the mint.
The mint could decide to rug you at any time and just never give you your actual sats back at all.
In regular eCash wallets, the tokens are stored on your device, so losing your device means you can never get your sats back, unless you kept a backup of your tokens somewhere.
In NIP-60 wallets, those tokens are instead stored on Nostr relays, meaning you can access them from any device. And no one else can access them because they are encrypted and can only be decrypted by your private key.
Now, the whole IOU language may scare you away from eCash at first, an IOU is all you are actually holding when you use ANY custodian. Looks like you use Wallet of Satoshi, based on your lightning address. They're just another custodian that has given you an IOU. Thing is, that IOU is just tracked in their database, so you have absolutely zero privacy.
With eCash, you can transact with those tokens with anyone else who is willing to accept them as payment and the mint doesn't have any idea who you are transacting with. Whoever then wants to get actual sats in return for those tokens can turn the tokens in to the mint and receive sats in return.
Hope that helps a bit with understanding the benefits of eCash over other custodial solutions, while still recognizing it IS just a custodial solution.
When you put your sats into an eCash mint, they hold onto your actual sats for you and give you some ecash tokens in exchange. You have to keep those tokens safe, because you can only get your actual sats back, or spend them with someone outside of the mint, by giving those tokens back to the mint.
The mint could decide to rug you at any time and just never give you your actual sats back at all.
In regular eCash wallets, the tokens are stored on your device, so losing your device means you can never get your sats back, unless you kept a backup of your tokens somewhere.
In NIP-60 wallets, those tokens are instead stored on Nostr relays, meaning you can access them from any device. And no one else can access them because they are encrypted and can only be decrypted by your private key.
Now, the whole IOU language may scare you away from eCash at first, an IOU is all you are actually holding when you use ANY custodian. Looks like you use Wallet of Satoshi, based on your lightning address. They're just another custodian that has given you an IOU. Thing is, that IOU is just tracked in their database, so you have absolutely zero privacy.
With eCash, you can transact with those tokens with anyone else who is willing to accept them as payment and the mint doesn't have any idea who you are transacting with. Whoever then wants to get actual sats in return for those tokens can turn the tokens in to the mint and receive sats in return.
Hope that helps a bit with understanding the benefits of eCash over other custodial solutions, while still recognizing it IS just a custodial solution.