Federated Chaumian Mints Provide A Way For Bitcoin Users To Distribute Trust

FediMint could provide the Bitcoin stack with an open source, distributed, censorship resistant custody layer for less technical Bitcoin users.

The below is a direct excerpt of Marty’s Bent Issue #1193: “I am very bullish on Chaumian Mints.” Sign up for the newsletter here.

We’ve talked about Chaumian Mints in this rag before in the past, specifically MiniMint (built on the FediMint protocol), and expressed how bullish we are on the concept and the benefits it could bring Bitcoiners in terms of privacy and scalability. Well, we meet here in this dark corner of the internet again to reiterate our bullishness on the project and to provide you freaks with an update from the people working on the protocol.

Above is a timestamped YouTube video that begins with a keynote speech from Obi Nwosu describing why he believes that FediMint can provide the Bitcoin open source ecosystem with the missing third pillar of the decentralized stack: custody. The Bitcoin base layer provides an open source, distributed, censorship resistant, store of value settlement layer. The Lightning Network provides a second layer, distributed, censorship resistant payments layer. FediMint, if successful, could provide the stack with an open source, distributed, censorship resistant custody layer.

FediMint achieves this by creating a Chaumian Mint that makes it easy for competent technical leaders in a given community to create a multisignature federation to process transactions for less technically competent community members. Federation members don’t know who is entering or leaving their mint and they can’t tell who is transacting within it. Making it impossible to target and censor specific individuals leveraging a mint. These are but a few of the benefits that come with Chaumian Mints.

I highly recommend you freaks check out Obi’s talk and the panel with Eric Sirion and Casey Rodarmor led by Aaron van Wirdum that follows. Very high signal over the course of forty minutes.