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397 sats \ 3 replies \ @anon 1 Feb \ on: Mercury layer AMA bitcoin
How can state chain operators like mercury defend themselves from a nation state attack. What stops the government from just shutting down the server.
One of the main motivations for the development of mercury layer (from the original mercury statechains) is the fact that the operator is blinded: they don't and cannot know anything about the coins (or even if they are coins) - it just stores key shares and updates them in accordance with the protocol.
This does put the operator in a very good legal position as opposed to say, a custodian. But ultimately there is nothing stopping a government from doing whatever they want - and could make such a thing illegal (but IMO this would be like making cloud providers and KMS illegal).
But crucially, even if the operator gets shut down, all owners get their coins after a timelock with the backup transaction.
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Mercury is the only statechain implimentation as far as I am aware.
The difference with a sidechain (like Liquid or RSK) is that you only verify the chain of signatures for the one coin (instead of all coins), it is not custodial and there is a unilateral exit (backup tx).
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