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@Egge described an elegant solution to this: with cashu payment requests, the merchant itself specifies which mint the merchant is willing to accept. At that point the wallet can do a swap between mints. This actually makes accepting these things viable imo. If the merchant has a trust relation with a specific mint, and the ecash wallet has the ability to auto-swap, then it actually starts to make sense.
jb55's avatar jb55
When considering accepting cashu for my anonymous ai proxy i ran into this dilemma. Can cashu people please explain this to me. Is providing this option mainly a convenience for the users who prefer using evash? Can’t their cashu wallet just do lightning without doing this dance to begin with? I am continually baffled at what the point of ecash is when it appears to be just a clunky and redundant interface on top of lightning. View quoted note →
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In summary, the main advantage of Cashu is that it frees ordinary people, who may not know much about the Lightning Network, from the challenging task of operating a Lightning Network node. Complex issues like inbound and outbound liquidity are handled by specialized mints. The downside, of course, is that it is custodial, meaning there is always a risk that the service could disappear, and this risk primarily falls on the buyer who actually receives the Cashu tokens. As a seller, there is no need to trust random mints (in which case the tokens would essentially have no value); you can choose to only accept tokens from specific mints that you trust. This means that both buyers and sellers can deposit or receive payments through mints they trust. However, this also means that sellers and buyers must rely on their trusted mints to "swap" through the Lightning Network, which still presents the issue of routing failures. Ultimately, even when using Cashu, payment failures can occur. Of course, the liquidity management will be much more professional than that of the buyer or seller.