Signed the Declaration of Independence today with my Nostr private key. AMA

I am assuming that "free for anyone to use" is what you meant by permissionless. They are each centralized and moderated services. The only way for a blossom server to be truly permissionless is for the user to run their own.

Pretty sure both Primal's and Nostr.Build's blossom servers allow free uploads of up to 100MB.

Self-hosted and frictionless are not compatible terms, particularly in Lightning.

The most user-friendly is probably Alby Hub, by far, which is what I use on my Start9. However, you still have all of the same friction points of every self-hosted lightning node that come with having to manage your own channels, their liquidity, choosing quality channel partners, etc.

And then your Tor connection goes on the fritz, so half your channels are offline until you can get it back up, hoping your channel partner didn't force-close on you.

The constant cry is that we need to make this more straightforward for normies so they can self-host their own lightning infrastructure. Sorry, but that's not possible. Some of these things can be automated, for sure, but that just introduces a different set of friction points when the normie gets a much larger than expected fee, because they had no idea what inbound liquidity is, let alone that they ran out of it.

Most of the popular ecash wallets, such as minibits, provide a lightning address, and you use their mint by default. I believe any sats sent to that lightning address from outside of their mint would be converted to ecash from their mint, even if you have added other mints in the wallet.

The same would apply to lightning addresses from other mints, like cashu.me or npub.cash. Ecash sent to the lightning address from a different mint would first be melted and sent via lightning, and then minted as ecash from the mint that provided the lightning address. Ecash from the same mint that provided the lightning address would simply be sent as ecash from within the mint, though.

Sounds superfluous. Ecash wallets send via lightning when the user is not in the same mint already, and typically can detect from the lightning address if they are in the same mint to send as ecash instead.

Ideally, users should not have to figure out whether they should send a transaction as lightning, ecash, liquid, or any other payment rail. Lightning should be the interoperability layer that is front facing, and everything else just happens in the background without the user needing to even know what is going on.

Amethyst has auto-translate.

100% agree. Users should have some indication that the event will be protected, and ideally a way to select whether or not they want the event to be protected when they write to a single relay.

The protected tag is a relatively new feature that clients may have slowly been adding. I think it was originally thought up for the sake of lockbox and zapbox relays, so that there could be kind 1 and other standard note types that could be published to a specific relay that only a select group could read from. This would be more private than publishing to public relays that anyone can read from, but less private than encrypting the content.

My guess is that if the client has a feature to specify a particular relay to post to, rather than posting to your outbox relays like normal, it probably adds that tag, assuming that you ONLY want the note to exist on that relay. Generally a safe assumption, except in this case.

Whatever client you are using is adding the "-" tag to the note to indicate that it is a protected event, which should not be accepted as a rebroadcast.

Tollgate is a different product entirely, since it is the user paying the wifi provider directly. There's no reason someone couldn't create something similar to what you described, where the cell phone company pays the wifi provider in Bitcoin whenever their customers use the wifi, though.