Learning Bitcoin and Design #11: FediMint

This call is intended to help you learn new concepts about Bitcoin, Lightning, and design. The general format will be to focus on a specific topic or read-through a document together and discuss (like a chapter of the Design Guide, or something that will help us learn about Bitcoin and Lightning).

On this call, we'll focus on FediMint, which is an idea aimed at improving the scalability and privacy of bitcoin that has a different set of trade-offs than many of the other ideas being discussed.

Call Notes: https://github.com/BitcoinDesign/Meta/issues/309

00:00 - Introduction
01:05 - Justin introduces FediMint
01:50 - Scalability
03:55 - Privacy
05:10 - Custody with a federated mint
09:20 - Community banking use case
10:50 - Where is the FediMint project right now?
13:15 - Self-custody vs. Community-custody
17:30 - Are mints interoperable? How chaumian mints work
21:25 - Connecting mints over lightning
30:20 - Backups for FediMint users
38:45 - Backing up other user wallet metadata
43:10 - Checking the status of the mint or proof-of-funds
47:10 - Hypothetical: remove some privacy features and add more proof-of-liabilities
49:20 - What should the initial setup of a FediMint server look like?
52:20 - There can be many FediMints and each can try different design patterns
56:40 - Different types of users for FediMints
59:00 - Closing