A mint itself takes possession of the sats, and offers a service to
- give you tokens for sats
- swap tokens for fresh tokens
- accept requests to pay bolt11 lightning invoices denominated in satoshis and provides an offer exchange rate
- may fullfill payment of aforementioned invoices through bridging to lightning network.
When you send satoshis to a cashu mint, you are effectively selling your sats for tokens under the hope that you can later get some of that value back.
quoting- Proof of work was invented to prevent spam.
nevent1q…nnyk
- Satoshi used PoW to rate-limit block production.
- Blocks create scarce Satoshis.
- Cashu puts Satoshis into bearer ecash tokens.
- KeyChat (privacy messenger) uses Cashu tokens as stamps to prevent spam.
Full circle adam3us (npub1qg8…24kw).