I bet on Cashu rather than NWC here is my thinking why:
The problem with NWC is that it's quite unreliable in my experience and sluggish, at least compared to Cashu.
Additionally, the UX of copy pasting random strings all over the place is also a hurdle.
With Nostr Wallets (i.e. cashu encrypted on relays) payments are much faster and more reliable, alas the balance could be unreliable when pulling nutzaps from all over the place and trying to consolidate the tokens client-side. That's sth we can improve easily by improving implementations of the spec though.
Zaps:
Another problem I see is that LN zap receipts are inherently less stable and less reliable than Cashu Nutzaps where you don't need to pray to a node to publish a zap receipt in the format you want it to, to the relays you want it to and have access and good connection to, because as Pablo said "the money is the receipt" which just means that pubkey-locked cashu can be directly posted to relays and at that point it is an easier-to-verify zap that has tags you control as the app dev and is posted to the right relays and you immediately know if sth went sideways.
Zap Verification:
When you as an outside observer want to calculate reputation of a pubkey and pull in zaps, it's easy to check if the mint is trusted or not, from mint recommendation events and cashu mint list preference events. LN nodes don't have such and it's inherently harder to earn Reputation as an LN node than centralized mints.
Ultimately cashu is just so much easier to handle and fits nostr better for most use cases.
The way I see rn is that NWC has been a good interim solution but there is more potential in Cashu, except for node runners ofc, a fringe cohort.
When user wants to make bigger payments, I would recommend copy-pasting the invoice rather than NWC, and when it's about small ones just use cashu that is interoperable throughout nostr and automatically appearing in clients that implement it.
MPP will make even larger cashu payments possible in the long run. NWC-s days are numbered I think but who knows, perhaps I am wrong.
Curious to hear your thoughts!
Five
npub16p…kfhdw
2025-05-13 08:31:49
in reply to nevent1q…cjjs
Author Public Key
npub16p8v7varqwjes5hak6q7mz6pygqm4pwc6gve4mrned3xs8tz42gq7kfhdwPublished at
2025-05-13 08:31:49Event JSON
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"content": "I bet on Cashu rather than NWC here is my thinking why:\nThe problem with NWC is that it's quite unreliable in my experience and sluggish, at least compared to Cashu.\n\nAdditionally, the UX of copy pasting random strings all over the place is also a hurdle.\n\nWith Nostr Wallets (i.e. cashu encrypted on relays) payments are much faster and more reliable, alas the balance could be unreliable when pulling nutzaps from all over the place and trying to consolidate the tokens client-side. That's sth we can improve easily by improving implementations of the spec though.\n\nZaps:\nAnother problem I see is that LN zap receipts are inherently less stable and less reliable than Cashu Nutzaps where you don't need to pray to a node to publish a zap receipt in the format you want it to, to the relays you want it to and have access and good connection to, because as Pablo said \"the money is the receipt\" which just means that pubkey-locked cashu can be directly posted to relays and at that point it is an easier-to-verify zap that has tags you control as the app dev and is posted to the right relays and you immediately know if sth went sideways.\n\nZap Verification:\nWhen you as an outside observer want to calculate reputation of a pubkey and pull in zaps, it's easy to check if the mint is trusted or not, from mint recommendation events and cashu mint list preference events. LN nodes don't have such and it's inherently harder to earn Reputation as an LN node than centralized mints.\n\nUltimately cashu is just so much easier to handle and fits nostr better for most use cases.\n\nThe way I see rn is that NWC has been a good interim solution but there is more potential in Cashu, except for node runners ofc, a fringe cohort.\n\nWhen user wants to make bigger payments, I would recommend copy-pasting the invoice rather than NWC, and when it's about small ones just use cashu that is interoperable throughout nostr and automatically appearing in clients that implement it.\n\nMPP will make even larger cashu payments possible in the long run. NWC-s days are numbered I think but who knows, perhaps I am wrong.\n\nCurious to hear your thoughts!",
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