"Four years ago, in a building in the former industrial heart of Prague, Eric Sirion sat at his computer with freshly written code and a simple mission: buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin. The place was Paralelní Polis, during the annual Hackers Congress - a fitting venue for an experiment in digital freedom. This was not the first time Bitcoin had been used to buy coffee, but this time was different."
"In the 1980s, David Chaum introduced the concept of ecash, pioneering digital money that was private by default through cryptographic innovation. His company, DigiCash, was ahead of its time, but the core idea endured: money that works like cash - untraceable, fungible, and private. Years later, Hal Finney, the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction from Satoshi Nakamoto, recognized Bitcoin's potential but also its limits."
"When Eric Sirion bought that coffee in Prague, he was building on this lineage - carrying Chaum's ideas and Finney's foresight into a working protocol for private payments atop Bitcoin. In the months that followed, the Fedimint protocol was released, development accelerated, and adoption began to spread. Soon after, another protocol - Cashu - emerged, offering a single mint model that offered easier setup and rapid experimentation. Fedimint, by contrast, enabled resilience through"
In Prague, Eric Sirion completed the first ecash purchase on Bitcoin using the Fedimint Chaumian ecash protocol, paying for a cup of coffee. Chaumian ecash originated with David Chaum in the 1980s, establishing private, untraceable, and fungible digital money through cryptographic techniques. Hal Finney foresaw the need for privacy-enhancing layers on Bitcoin and envisioned combining Chaum's concepts with Bitcoin's resilience. Fedimint emerged as a federated-mint implementation that provides resilience through multiple operators, while Cashu introduced a single-mint model enabling easier setup and faster experimentation. Both protocols catalyzed renewed development and adoption of privacy-preserving Bitcoin payments.
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