I'm currently using @Minibits mint through @Keychat , and I'm reaching out with a question. I'm personally developing a service that requires payment via hold invoice, and during development, I was testing the expiration/cancellation behavior by paying a hold invoice using the Keychat Cashu wallet. The payment attempt initially seemed to fail—although the payment did reach the recipient side, it remained in a "pending" state since it wasn't settled, which is expected. I didn't mind the unclear UI indication, since most wallets don't clearly display pending states anyway.

However, the next day, after the invoice expired as intended and the payment properly failed, I noticed that the deducted balance in my Keychat wallet wasn't restored. Normally, when a hold invoice is canceled, the mint's Lightning node should recover the funds and reflect that credit back to the user's balance. If this were my own Lightning node, the balance recovery would have happened automatically. But with the Cashu wallet, since I had already paid ecash to the mint to initiate the payment, my balance was deducted up front. From the mint’s perspective, once the ecash was spent, the balance was marked as spent—even though settlement never occurred. And since the control had already been effectively transferred, the mint likely considered the payment as completed on its end. It doesn’t appear to track the subsequent cancellation status.

Moreover, due to the anonymous nature of ecash, the mint likely can't identify who made the payment—even if they wanted to issue a refund, it might not be possible. I can provide proof of the hold invoice and confirmation that it was ultimately canceled (via DM). Surely a refund shouldn’t be impossible? I understand it might not be easy to verify, and while I understand if no refund can be issued (it's only 5,028 sats, not a large amount), this highlights a bigger issue: going forward, such payments need to be properly handled. Otherwise, it effectively means users permanently lose funds to the mint even when payments fail. This isn't just an issue with Minibits, but likely all #cashu mints. A proper mechanism needs to be developed to handle these cases.

There's a feature in Keychat wallet where sending "pay ecash" returns an ecash token, but sometimes it comes with a QR code and sometimes it doesn't. What's the difference? I'd like to provide a smooth experience where users can simply pass along a QR code, but when it only returns a token, I have to send it via DM, which is a bit inconvenient.

#asknostr @Keychat