If we want ecash to have any hope of working out, we need anonymous mints, but anonymous mints are likely to get stolen. Instead, we need anonymous mints that are operated by one of N well-known and trusted parties. Mint operator(s) should take N public keys known to be from N well-known and trusted persons in the bitcoin space, then create ring sig(s) across those N to reveal that they are one of those N parties, but not which one. Given many long-timers at one point or another had public donation addresses or some other key that is known to be theirs, this should actually be relatively doable, just don’t put too much money in the mint :)

Man, not sure why someone would work on cryptocurrency at all in the Netherlands with these words. View quoted note →

These next few years are as existential for bitcoin as the Blocksize Wars. Back then it was about who got to decide what bitcoin was, now it’s about what bitcoin is.

Bitcoin's Precarious Position · BlueMatt's Blog

The shitty thing is lightning labs could have easily built this as a separate dollar-specific network that is KYC’d, but they didn’t. Still wouldn’t have been great for lightning but wouldn’t have been as bad. In fact it would have been less work for them to do this! View quoted note →

Bitcoin hasn’t felt like it’s been in this much of an existential crisis since the block size wars. And this time there’s no mobilization in the community in its defense.

The issues raised by lipa in their post (that LDK is a complicated API and a lot to work with, that RGS had some stability issues, and that LDK’s pathfinding was sub-optimal) are things that were true a year ago, but are also things that have been largely addressed by LDK itself since - The introduction of ldk-node has made it incredibly easy to get from zero to a full lightning node on a phone in minutes, RGS has seen a lot of debugging and improvements, and LDK’s pathfinding is now by far the most advanced in lightning (but, like with all lightning nodes, you need to be well connected or have sent a lot of payments to have data to use for pathfinding). View quoted note →

Just wait until this normalizes LSPs KYCing users because they’re executing USD<>BTC trades on their behalf. View quoted note →