Thread

While lightning retains much of the Bitcoin base layer's tradeoffs and security, Ecash changes much of them and quite profoundly. Here is just one example. E-cash transactions are not finalized until the token is redeemed. So you can send someone E-cash, but until they redeem it, you still have control. Because of this unclaimed tokens can be clawed back by the issuer. So transaction finality has been seriously changed under this scheme. This could be very useful for example in a store that wants to issue promotional value (like coupons or scrip) but not be responsible for the value of unspent ecash. Or, a family member could gift someone bitcoin using this method and then if that person loses or doesn't ever redeem their bitcoin, the family member can claw back their value rather than just having lost it. But this also means that the mint has more control and is a centralized system that must be trusted. particularly in the case of cashu in which mints are single issuers and must be trusted explicitly. I am quite concerned that the Bitcoin community in general is treating this like some Bitcoin analog. Almost as if it is a one-for-one scaling method, and it is not. We need to carefully consider the trade-offs and see what advantages they give senders, receivers and issuers, and then what disadvantages also are implied by these changes. I am personally avoiding using it for anything significant whatsoever until the effects and downstream and attack surface of these trade-offs has been more deeply probed and defined. Good luck.

If you do payment per request, you dont have to generate invoices. The request will be paid through a header attribute.

Ecash sats work better for very small payments. With Phoenix Wallet charging 0.4% plus 4 sats per transfer, sending less than 100 sats isn’t practical.

'Cashu people' Report slur

Maybe not directly applicable to your use case here, but mints can help as mixers if nothing else. Another use case is sending offline payments. You need to be online to receive (so you can redeem) but the sender is now untethered to the lightning gateway.

Privacy. That's it I think, but it's not insignificant for things like this.

I see the value of cashu as a merchant because there are very few customers who pay with sats. It requires a lot of management to keep lightning liquidity balanced for an occassional in person payment. Now with Zeus POS + cashu + Square I have an integrated inventory system where staff can ring up customers like normal, have my inventory pulled, the customer can scan qr code, get a normal receipt and we receive payment without fussing with liquidity. The customer can use ecash or their own lightning wallet as we are presenting a lightning invoice qr code. Then we can sweep the ecash from the mint into a lighting channel on Zeus at the end of the day hopefully reducing fees.

I’m still confused about Cashu. No one has clearly articulated how it works to me. I’ve asked “where do I spend it?” and haven’t received an answer. Some people barely understand Bitcoin and its uses. How does one expect someone to understand Cashu on top of it? I’m being serious. What are the benefits of using Cashu? Is there a white paper about it? Does it have a mathematical foundation? What’s the purpose? What problems will it solve? Someone can chime in. I’m all ears. Be respectful.

My view (based on not much knowledge) has been that ecash is primarily useful as an accounting system when multiple people are using the same lightning node