Considering a new approach to private payments in Signal: using Cashu protocol for Bitcoin transactions instead of MobileCoin. What do you think about this idea?
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Looks interesting, I think the ecash idea has legs.
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Wow people will really do anything to avoid just using monero
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Hey its not easy to acquire it and use it especially when a lot more merchants accept BTC and not XMR.
There’s no need for a superiority complex here. And using BTC doesn’t by default mean they’re avoiding XMR. What kind of logic are you using here?
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Still waiting for the Monero integration into Molly. The Monero Wallet SDK was finished this year, but I can’t find any progress for getting it into Molly. 
I always thought that Bitcoin maxis a the most toxic group in the space, until I found out that Monero maxis are a lot more toxic.
Yes Monero is the kign of anonymity, BUT this doesn’t mean that anything else can’t also a good solution.
Especially for day to day payments, the Cashu solution is probably better then XMR.
8 posts were split to a new topic: How do you compare Zcash with other cryptocurrencies like Monero?
Monero and Ecash fullfill totally different purposes.
Ecash is for daily transactions that are extremly private and settled in a few seconds (or even below 1 second if you are on the same mint).
A Monero transaction needs at least 10 minutes to be considered final and I highly doubt that anyone wants to wait in a store 10 minutes before he can leave with his stuff, cause the cashier want him to wait the settlement time.
For exactly this stuff are Ecash solutions like Cashu build.
Good read on the issues of E-cash solutions such as Cashu.
Actually, the original topic was using Bitcoin with Cashu. This was not a Zcash thread, so you’re also off topic if you’re concerned that much about it, and if that’s your argument for Zcash then I don’t see why it doesn’t also apply to Bitcoin/Cashu, which would also be vastly superior to Zcash in that Bitcoin is more decentralized, mainstream, and proven as an asset with value.
Yeah the “Offtopic” in my post is meant for my post, I’m being offtopic, Also I’m not against other payment methods, some look very good actually all I wanted is to question some points Jonah made against Zcash, that’s it.
In the future with things like NEAR being able to send any currency from your wallet I don’t think the specific crypto you use will be that important.
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Agreed
Monero is not “The king of anonymity” in generell
For people that don’t self host their own Monero node and therefore need to hand their view keys over to a third party node, which would be true for 99.99% of Signal users, the privacy of Monero is far behind the privacy of Cashu.
Zcash has too long confirmation times for day to day payments (like Monero and Bitcoin too)
Why does a chat app need any “integrated” cryptocurrency functionality? All cryptocurrencies are internet-native. It’s very easy already to use any cryptocurrency over Signal (or any other E2EE messenger…definitely wouldn’t trust a non-E2EE messenger for sending and receiving cryptocurrency info). You can simply send a chat message to a contact with your receiving address or vice versa, then copy the address/payment request to a wallet on your phone (or on a different device) and pay it. It’s incredibly simple and, again, you can just use whatever cryptocurrency you and your contacts want to use.
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I’ve not heard of “cashu” before but it seems to be a “layer 3” application: Bitcoin blockchain → Lightning (for lower fees and better transaction speed) → Cashu (for privacy)
Now I don’t want to poo-poo the technical achievements of Cashu and the utility (bringing private transactions to Bitcoin), but when we already have Monero (layer 1, privacy by default), and Litecoin MWEB (layer 1, opt-in privacy) - and at least Litecoin is something you can buy at any CEX - then I don’t really see the point.
Because too many people have been trained and taught that integration of apps is “better” because it reduces friction. Many, many people see friction as some terrible horrible thing, and will demand enshitification they later complain about just to make something take one less click/tap now. People are lazy and want free things to let them be lazier.
The same people that think this would be great also would scream and complain if Signal, a company running on donations and one guy’s cash, took a cut to fund the costs of doing all this.
Thanks for sharign the article, here are my thought on the arguments:
“The will make running mints illegal”
The base assumption here is that “a mint is a money services business and thus subject to egregious banking laws.” I am not a lawyer but this statement is in contradiction with the fact that we already have mints tied to real identities running in the open without any banking regulation applied to them.
To give one example, we have the Minibits mint
Which doesn’t perform any KYC or AML despite being an official company registered in the European Union (Slovak republic) and its Lightning node also running in the EU (Germany).
This is neither an anonymous mint, nor someone sitting in a place where laws are not enforced.
If you want I could also link other example mints.
And even if all countries of the world make it illegal to run a mint.
Its totally possible to build trust on an pseudonymous base.
By
- Making big investments in the reputation by contribution code and donations
- Then running the mint for a very long time establishing a trust history.
I generally think that the “They will make it illegal” is a bad way of argumenting in the first place because they (refering to law makers) could also try to ban Monero, Zcash or whatever your suggesting as the better solution for privacy. And speaking for Monero, they have applied much more laws against it then they will probably ever apply against Bitcoin or its scaling solutions.
The seed
“Lastly, the most difficult hurdle for many people to adopting Bitcoin is the simple first step – writing down 12 words and making sure not to lose them. With e-cash you still have this single greatest barrier of entry as you must backup a seed phrase or secret in order to restore your e-cash tokens.”
Their are many arguments for or against cryptocurrency but I never get the “the seed is hard to store” argument.
A seed is at least as easy to store as the mail/username+password combination you need to store for every online service.
Its even easier because the seed is derived from an optimized list of words especially made to avoid errors in storage.
And this continues to improve through things like SLIP39, which has an even more optimized pool of words.
The real problems if you want to onbaord the mases into the crypto currency space are:
- Fees: If everyone wants to use the base layer for everything the fees would become astronomically high.
- Confirmation time: The confirmation times of nearly any layer 1 are just to long for everyday transaction, especially if you want to pay something in real life.
- Liquidity Management: Solution like Lightning solve the issues 1 and 2 but require to have enough liquidity in both directions and some management to complish this, it also require to at least make 1 on chain transaction to create the channel.
Noting down a seed, is probably the easiest thing about crypto currencies.
The custody trap
The argument here is that Ecash is not directly self custodial, because the mint hold’s the funds that are baking the tokens.
This statement is correct, but if you really understand what Cashu is designed for, you understand why this is not such big of a deal like it sounds.
Cashu is not meant for hodling large amounts, its purpose is to by used as digital cash that you can withdraw and deposit from and to the layers above (Lightning/Onchain).
You never put so much money into Cashu, that it would ruin you if it gets lost.
Yes, I am too against the idea that people put there live savings in Cashu.
But this is not the plan.
On Chain is meant for savings.
Lightning is meant for scaling and interconecting everything inside the Bitcoin space.
Cashu is meant for day to day spending.
I also want to mention that we can and should decentralize Ecash as much as possible.
Cashu is only a temporary solution for Ecash until the Fedimint protocol is mature enough to take its place.
When the technology is ready we can have Fedimints that are spread across many different entities in different jurisdictions and achieve a very acceptable level of decentralization.
Using Cashu inside Signal could work, but it depends on how much people value convenience over full privacy. Cashu gives good privacy because the server cannot tell who spends what. That fits well with Signal’s goal of private communication.
The main challenge is onboarding. Most users do not know how to get e-cash tokens or run their own mint. MobileCoin was chosen because it was simple to use, even if it had tradeoffs.
If Signal added Cashu support, it would need an easy way to acquire and send tokens. If that part is solved, this could be a strong option for private peer-to-peer payments. Without this, only advanced users will use it.
Lightning transactions are already fairly private if you run your own node. It seems the additional benefits of Cashu are you can use a custodial node instead of running your own with privacy from the node operator observing all your transactions.
The confirmations times are too long and if you on board everyone, either fees or chain size has to increase extremly.
Its all depends ony many factors.
Cashu would need to get a lot more adoption so that some mints have enough user’s to get even 1% of Moneros anonymite set.
But I have to admit that if Signal would host their own mint, the anonymity set could probably be larger the of Monero