Author: Casey Rodarmor 2021-06-28 01:45:42
Published on: 2021-06-28T01:45:42+00:00
The author, Casey Rodarmor, wrote a blog post on the potential benefits of Chaumian mints or blind mints in making hosted lightning wallets more private and secure. He believes that self-hosted Lightning wallets present usability challenges not present in on-chain wallets, which may make hosted wallets a popular option. Blind mints offer a solution to these problems, particularly when operation is federated. Mint transactions are cheap and can be performed at unlimited scale. Despite the interesting properties of Chaumian mints, they have largely been forgotten. However, compared to a naive hosted Lightning Network wallet, a service operated as a federated Chaumian mint offers excellent privacy, usability, security, and scaling. Blind signatures protect against internal privacy leaks, making them a strict improvement over custodial Lightning wallets. If the number of users is large, external privacy leaks are also prevented. Compared to a self-managed Lightning Network wallet, and similar to a standard custodial Lightning Network wallet, Lightning mint wallets offer superior usability. A user need not be concerned with the details of node operation or channel management, and can deposit to and withdraw from their account with standard Lightning Network invoices. The security of a Lightning mint is weaker than that of a self-hosted wallet, but compared to a standard custodial Lightning Network wallet, security is greatly improved.Mint operations are extremely lightweight, similar to Lightning Network transactions, so scaling properties are similar to the Lightning Network itself. Additionally, users need not manage their own channels, so a well-capitalized federation can open channels efficiently, lowering the per-transaction channel management overhead. The author believes that such systems will be developed with a standardized protocol for communication between wallet interfaces and mint backends.For more discussion of Chaumian mints and their applicability to Bitcoin, see fedimint.org. Elsirion, the author, is also at work on MiniMint, a federated Chaumian mint with Bitcoin and eventually Lightning Network support. The author believes that Chaumian mints were never of particular interest or importance because they were limited to interoperating with the fiat currencies of the time. With the ascendance of Bitcoin, mints now have access to a powerful, decentralized, and uncensorable currency, made economical and fast by the Lightning Network.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T04:23:21.807673+00:00