Thread

Has anyone looked into Statechains / Mercury Protocol? The premise is swapping/passing on Private Keys to trade value instead of moving sats from a UTXO to another. Cool in theory right? The coins get locked into a channel state and then you can pass on the priv key by using a multi SIG set up where a coordinator burns the old priv key and a new one is generated. (Its complex but this is the easiest way I can ELI5). I thought the idea had merit. But it sort of died and no one took it up. @calle @jb55 did you guys ever look into it? #AskNostr

Replies (14)

↩ replying to JD
with state chains you always have an operator that coordinates the swap of keys, and ensuring old ones are deleted, in spark setup as long as at least one operator is honest your good, they also cannot keep your funds you have unilateral exit. The downside of spark currently is bad privacy, and few operators all run by spark, so yeah for now you are trusting them to not collude with another party, but that's just how state chains work.
↩ replying to JD
A person is no different from an entity the trust level is the same or even worse. A distributed set of people/entities like a federation is the same as a group of Spark operators where only one honest one is enough. Keep in mind that Spark operators don't mean they are run by Spark. What you mention that could help is that making it easy for someone to run the operator sw and join and maybe make some standard so that you can have many different state chains but all compatible, don't know if it's possible.
↩ replying to idsera
learning more RN. Presodio Bitcoin did a podcast on it. the operator, and spark provider and spark entity are all different. they are explaining that the provider side is closed source but in theory anyone with the high capability could also be one. interesting stuff