Cashoo: Chowmian E-Cash & Mints Over Lightning

March 17 Cashoo: Chowmian E-Cash & Mints Over Lightning

Cashu is a project for Lightning Network enabled Chowmian e-cash for bitcoin. Chaumian e-Cash is a digital cash payment system named after famed cryptographer David Chaum, whose pre-bitcoin, early electronic cash system “DigiCash” offered vast improvements in user security and privacy using cryptography. .

Chowmian E-Cash Over Lightning With Kashoo

Cashu Chowmian is an exciting new Layer to Bitcoin project for e-cash and mints that enables fast, scalable, fully private, cheap, bitcoin-backed e-cash transactions. Cashoo creates a mint, which issues e-cash tokens on the Lightning Network that accepts bitcoin and uses blind signatures to mint e-cash tokens, which can be spent, received , transactions can be made and eventually redeemed for bitcoin.

With Cashoo, no account or personal information is required, Mint can’t see your balance, tokens, or who you’re transacting with, and you can hold onto your own tokens, ( Although your bitcoin is in the custody of the mint). Cashoo allows anyone to start a mint and act as a “bank” that can issue e-cash. Users have the freedom to choose the mint they want to use, and can redeem their e-Cash tokens for bitcoin at any time.

created by kashu CalleA pseudonymous bitcoin and Lightning Network developer who draws inspiration for Cashu from David Chaum’s original “digicash” Chaumian e-cash system, which was launched in the 1990s but which failed to gain traction and mainstream adoption Stayed.

To be more precise, Cashu is based on a variant of Chaumian Blinding, designed by David Wagner, a student of Chaum, as well as a MiniCash-based token logic that uses the blind Diffie-Hellman’s exchange scheme. . Wagner was a student of Chaume who came up with an alternative implementation of e-Cash to obtain the same security and privacy guarantees through encryption while avoiding some of the patents held by Chaume for DigiCash.

Cashoo is similar to another Choumian e-cash project for bitcoin, known as Fedimint, which employs similar techniques to achieve the same goals of improved privacy and scalability, with the key difference being that that Fedimint employs federated Chaumian mints, while Cashu does not.

Cashu’s model allows anyone to create a mint, and allows any user to choose the mint they want to use, but the mints are independent of each other and not federated like Fadimint. Cashew users can easily use multiple mints depending on the mint’s reputation, cost, convenience, or other factors and incentives.

What benefits does Choumian E-Cash for Bitcoin provide?

Cashoo sets the stage for several important and key benefits that standard on-chain bitcoin or Lightning Network transactions do not possess. Cashoo’s e-Cash makes few compromises to achieve private, secure, scalable, cheap transactions. The main trade-off is that users must deposit satoshis with Mint to create e-cash, so this is a custodial wallet design, although custodial wallets normally require a custodial design with very few trust assumptions. Is.

Once a user deposits their bitcoin with the mint and generates e-Cash tokens, the mint has no way of knowing the number of users, who they are, their account balances, or their transactions. History. Cashoo users can make and receive payments from regular Lightning Network wallets with on-chain capabilities coming soon. Additionally, Cashoo e-Cash transactions are cheap, highly scalable and borderless.

Cashoo is a new project, still in the early stages of development, so improvements are constantly being implemented, and users should keep this in mind if they plan to use it with real money. That being said, it is one of the most exciting new projects that tackles the privacy and scalability issues of bitcoin from a new angle.

Cashoo’s E-Cash Custodial Lightning Wallet offers some differentiation from both a privacy and security perspective. Currently, custodial lightning wallets, while being instant and cheap, can censor user transactions if prompted or coerced, as well as monitor transaction data and spending habits. With e-cash, this is not possible as the mints do not know anything about the amounts or the senders and recipients.

Cashoo also offers the same speed and cost advantages of Lightning transactions, so payments are instant and falsely cheap, but with more privacy. Unlike non-custodial lightning wallets, Cashoo’s e-Cash still offers several advantages from a usability perspective. There is no need to manage channels and inbound/outbound liquidity, or deal with channels being unilaterally closed by liquidity partners.

Cal, the creator of Cashu, also envisions a future where Cashu is a protocol that can be easily added to a wide range of bitcoin wallets and services to make e-cash, mint, and Lightning Network integration more seamless. Cashoo offers various advantages that can be widely adopted across commerce applications and use cases.

Cashoo’s improved usability greatly simplifies the layer two experience for bitcoin most users are accustomed to through the Lightning Network, and elevates the level of privacy and security experienced by custodial Lightning wallet users over most custodial Lightning wallets available today. Is.

This could be a better and simpler way to provide a Lightning-like bitcoin user experience to non-technical users who only use bitcoin to buy and sell goods online without the headache of running and managing a bitcoin and Lightning Network node. want to do Channels and liquidity on their own.

Cashoo and other e-cash implementations like Fedimint have tremendous potential to significantly improve the bitcoin circular economy, by easing the learning curve faced by bitcoin users currently trying to adopt layer two technologies like the Lightning Network.

Whether bitcoin wallets, businesses and services will start supporting CashU or other e-cash schemes for bitcoin remains to be seen. Will e-cash revolutionize bitcoin this time around, or will it fade and fade like it did nearly 30 years ago when David Chaum attempted to bring Digicash to the masses in the 1990s?