Author: ZmnSCPxj 2020-09-24 00:19:48
Published on: 2020-09-24T00:19:48+00:00
The conversation between Tom and ZmnSCPxj discusses the security of statechains and compares it to other trust-minimised protocols such as TumbleBit and Wasabi. While statechains can be vulnerable to hardware corruption, it can be mitigated with secured infrastructure and the use of hardware security modules/trusted execution environments that enable secure deletion. The aim of statechains is to replicate the speed of a completely centralised mixer while making theft more difficult, providing users with proof of ownership/theft and privacy guarantees. However, ZmnSCPxj believes that the slowness of TumbleBit and Wasabi has less to do with security and more to do with gathering enough participants to get reasonable anonymity set. If the statechain entity itself does not participate and put up funds that its clients can acquire quickly, then a similar waiting period would be necessary anyway to gather enough participants to make swapping worthwhile. This would fail the goal of speed. On the other hand, if the statechain entity acts as a participant, then the previous participant would be the statechain entity itself, making its ability to outright steal funds certain and not much better than a mixer that provides "put money in this address, I will send you money in your address" service. Finally, ZmnSCPxj suggests that the SwapMarket plan by Chris Belcher would only require some number of confirmations of various transactions to get superior security, which would be a better tradeoff than what statechains provide.
Updated on: 2023-06-14T15:19:03.189511+00:00