If you run a web shop, a web hosting business or you offer VPS rental etc. you might want to use Cashu to improve your customer's privacy and avoid having to handle and store toxic data.
Here is how a VPS provider could use Cashu to unlink payments from purchases:
- Costumer logs in
- Charges their account to obtain Ecash minted by your own service (for example Bitcoin in, Ecash out or Fiat in, Ecash out)
- Ecash appears as the user's balance
- User uses Ecash to rent a VPS, paying it back to you
We made everything so easy that this can be integrated into your website using a simple wallet library. From the user's perspective, nothing changes compared to a classical top-up and purchase experience.
That way, you wouldn't need to know which credit card transaction belongs to which VPS purchase. No custodial risk eitther, you're the service provider.
Win win.
Replies (27)
t-y 4 spreading! calle, like the nym too!
This could be a really interesting way to bypass AML/KYC laws.
tl;dr: with ecash tokens you can put yourself in a position where you know who your customers are. But you don't know what they're actually buying.
I vaguely recall reading something along the lines of Apple using (or maybe just proposing) tech like this for their VPN-like private browsing product.
Google uses RSA blind signatures it for their VPN to achieve exactly this, to decouple of the VPN use from the user account.
Is there anything existing or in the works that is similar to btcpayserver but with each?
Ecash*
is there mint software that already does this?
I hope
@Proton Wallet, Njalla and
@Mullvad VPN look into this
You think
@npub155m2...dcvg will add Cashu or will there be a similar service?
Can this be integrated with an AI chatbot frontend like OpenWebUI? I want my users to log in with nostr and use cashu to pay for AI 🤖.
Can’t wait for this! Will happen eventually. I want to open my AI server and my custom agents to the world and get paid in bitcoin!
I don't get it; VPS provider knows Customer deposited X Bitcoin to top up their eCash (prepaid) balance. Customer uses this prepaid balance to pay for x-number of VPSs - but the provider still knows exactly which products (=VPSs) the customer pruchased cuz it's linked to their freakin' user profile!
What am I missing?
> What am I missing?
You don't need a user profile
But you wrote:
"- Customer logs in
- Charges their account"
...
Yes, read on.
You can purchase the VPS without identification. Just send the ecash to the service and receive a VPS.
Yeah but not requiring a user account is not something special to ecash; it's what LNVPN is doing: pay this invoice, get this service.
(Besides, your OP reads differently. Anyway 🤷)
Timestamps and transaction amounts would be the Achilles heel of this, right?
The customer "logs in" to "buy ecash" and then buys the VPS anonymously (with the ecash), logged out.
Again: how is this different from LNVPN??
Customer: hits Buy
Provider: pay this invoice (could be anything:LN, Monero, eCash)
Customer: sends funds
Provider: detects funds
Provider: generates connection details & sends to customer
You can do that and it's already a great step up. However:
- the payment is always associated with the purchase
- as soon as you want to have a balance that can be topped up, you need user (accounts)
Can they do the initial buy with fiat?
The ecash would never leave you as a service provider from what I understand.
But you then need to be able to prove that the ecash is only used for your products/services.
If you don't run a gateway yourself, I think that should be fine. People trading your utility tokens p2p is not your problem as a service provider.
Fun fact: this is actually how mobile money like M-Pesa started: people used airtime for mobile networks as a currency, then the carriers saw this and turned it into e-money products.
How do you see this interacting with KYC laws? Maybe there's an argument that you do know your customer (the logged in / fiat payment part) even if you don't know what resources each person is using...?
This was my intuition also, but is that actually how KYC laws work? Just "who" and not "what"?
Spot on re: Mpesa
funny that it’s only a few years ago when Mpesa went fully KYC and since then it’s become a privacy mess + big honey pot for hackers
eCash is a good case study on how to rebuild Mpesa the right way.
@calleHave you looked into ecash? It's a simpler architecture that sits on top of lightning.
@calle explains the design here. s/VPS/tor/g
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