0 sats \ 5 replies \ @TonyGiorgio 12 Sep 2023 \ parent \ on: Utxo Dealership: forthcoming BTC privacy tool & winner of Tabconf 2023 Hackathon bitcoin
Totally a free market that could happen, with anon pools being more profitable and getting more use. I think random coins swapping with random coins in an indistinguishable way will offer more ambiguity, but potentially more scrutiny on buyers.
ideally the utxo goes straight into the swap address as a coinbase output -- that way it belongs to the buyer from the moment it's created. I want chain analysts to have difficulty telling if someone bought the coinbase or mined it. Coinswaps help with this because, thanks to taproot, they look like an ordinary single sig address. (Well, right now mine don't, they look like a 2 of 2 -- but I am fixing that as we speak.)
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How do you stop grief?
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I don't have anything special in place
The buyer has to deposit first which I suppose imposes a kind of natural grief cost on him: griefing costs two mining fees, one to make the initial deposit and a second to abort.
I suppose I can make the abort transaction expensive by making it so the miner has to cosign it, and include an expensive op_return in there so that the only way the user can abort is by sacrificing a meaningful amount of money.
Or I can make it so that the abort transaction is only valid after a long timelock expires, that way I impose an opportunity cost on the aborter rather than destroying bitcoins forever.
If I make the buyer's abort transaction expensive, I should probably make the seller's abort transaction expensive too, that way there's parity. If either party aborts, the other party has to abort too, so it might be nice if that was disincentivized by making abortions costly for both parties.
Do you have any thoughts on this?
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Yeah that's interesting. It depends on the price of the fee I think. There's plenty of parties that would spend a lot of money to find things out.
Timelocks and total liquidity lock ups sound more costly if someone was trying to do this at scale. Lightning kinda requires that. Is that what a fidelity bond accomplishes?
If it was fee based, you may have other miners gladly spend the fees if it comes back to them anyways.
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Timelocks and total liquidity lock ups sound more costly if someone was trying to do this at scale. Lightning kinda requires that. Is that what a fidelity bond accomplishes?
That's my understanding, yes, though the world of fidelity bonds is also nuanced, and there are various kinds. Some people in that space argue that timelocking a large amount is the same thing, economically, as burning a small amount, because both involve sacrificing some value. I suppose the argument is something along the lines of "time really is money."
Maybe both abort transactions should have a 1 month timelock that locks up double the order's value for that period. That would discourage either party from griefing just to be trollish. If the abort transactions are both painful to use, neither party will want to do that.
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