Aren't the statechains on which Merculylayer is based a brainchild of Ruben? He may not know about all Mercury's implementation details, but I'd imagine he knows a lot about the protocol.
one of benefits listed in the article, interop with lightning:
By utilizing Statechains, you get to open and close channels off-chain at minimal costs. Is your channel too small? No problem. You can simply transfer your existing channel over to a larger UTXO. This can be particularly powerful considering it’s hard to know ahead of time how much capacity will be needed in a channel. Now you can cheaply experiment, and once you have a stable channel, you could choose to effortlessly move the channel over to the base layer by exiting from the Statechain.
Ruben is doing amazing work for Bitcoin. Very humble, so several of his projects take time to be recognized, but in the long run, I see his ones that require a soft-fork having a higher chance at success than similar ones such as BIP300 that suffer from the toxicity of their promoters.
The Mercury Layer is a technology that takes the R_1 = R1_1 + r2_1.G + b1.P and the e1 = SHA256(P||R_1||m1) for sig1_1 = r1_1 + c1.s1 and runs it all through the flux capacitor in order to obtain the dihedral synchro-helix actuation of the hash of the transaction. And that is clearly an improvement to the privacy of bitcoin.
very funny but this looks somehow familiar. Small r times big G is big R. And then some stuff around it that makes it obscure. This is similar how everything in Bitcoin looks 🧐🧐
Very cool, the technical details are very interesting but also it would be nice to share the why. Why this layer 2 over lightning, etc.
I do believe there is a typo:
The spending condition is most commonly defined by a single public key and can only be spent by a transaction signed with the corresponding public private key.
Mercury takes a UTXO as a building block and creates a system in which that one UTXO can be handed over to someone else.
This is facilitated by math! It comes down to this: s = s1 + o1 = s2 + o2.
Where s is the private key required to spend the UTXO. And s1 and s2 are the private keys of the facilitator (this is the guy you have to somewhat trust). And o1 is the private key of the original owner. o2, you guessed it, the private key of the new owner!
There are some provisions to make all of this safe and offline but in a tiny nutshell, this is it.
publicprivate key.s = s1 + o1 = s2 + o2.sis the private key required to spend the UTXO. Ands1ands2are the private keys of the facilitator (this is the guy you have to somewhat trust). Ando1is the private key of the original owner.o2, you guessed it, the private key of the new owner!SEor Statechain Entity) can't run away with your coins.