Has anyone provided an intelligent response to the concerns over how to gauge the trustworthiness of mints? I like cashu but the idea of having many mints from unknown parties concerns me. I’ve seen the recommendation to consolidate tokens to a trusted mint, but then isn’t that just creating a bunch of little potentially costly lightning payments (depending on the routing fees between mints/nodes)?

I think about how easily I could spin up a mint backed by 0 Bitcoin and I get concerned.

If every person that zapped you used a different mint and you swapped every zap to your mint, it would be no different fee wise than it is today. But in reality, people will coalesce around mints. They have less centralization forces than custodial lightning wallets, but will still tend to centralize. Because of this you won't swap individual zaps. You'll probably only swap once your untrusted mint balance hits a certain threshold. This logic could even be baked right into clients. Because of this, you will end up saving on fees.

Consider about how quickly this fraud would be noticed. The second anyone tried swapping you'd be caught and your mint would be ostracized by the community.

💯 IMO the issue isn’t ecash zaps. It’s how will nostr users identify trustworthy mints without everyone just consolidating to a small handful of custodial mints. We’ll come full circle.

Even if WoS and Custodial Alby switched to Cashu and they were the only two mints custodial users used, we'd be in a substantially better place than we are today. Cashu and custodial lightning do not have identical risks. Cashu is an improvement in multiple ways.

you could just use one custodian that you trust and you should be personally ok. you can choose, that's the idea.

and the "mint" could just be your own lightning wallet. coming soon 👀

This makes sense. It does sound a bit like what we already have with Alby, WoS, etc, and users coalescing around those few providers. But I realize that Cashu offers some additional usability over existing custodial lightning. My main concern is in identifying which mints are the trustworthy ones.

It offers improved UX (thanks @PABLOF7z 😁) and strong privacy and censorship resistance

👀💜

It makes sense and I’m on board. The benefits make sense. Identifying which mints to trust is my main concern.

I have spent a lot of time in all the cashu telegram groups. I have used every major cashu wallet. All the conversation is positive. The level of support has been excellent. The devs have gone above and beyond to solve individual issues personally. I use minibits mint as my primary mint. I have moved all zaps out and in and back out testing the mint. Open honest transparent building is our best option and Calle has led the open source teams on integrity and clarity. FOSS in action.

I keep thinking we could run our own mints. I’m waiting for the guys at @npub126nt...e9ll to add one to the App Store.