Mercury is a new Bitcoin layer-2 scaling technology, based on the concept of statechains, that enables private keys for BTC deposits (UTXOs) to be transfered securely between owners without requiring an on-chain transaction.
This enables users to transfer full custody of an amount of BTC to anyone almost instantly, with increased privacy, and without having to pay miner fees.
https://mercurywallet.com/ https://github.com/layer2tech/mercury-wallet https://twitter.com/mercury_wallet Onion address: mercury32vj43p4ychitp5qgqbcwmz36alalpd76nma3zbcedjmgyoqd.onion
This is super cool.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this, combined with NFC tags and offline.cash, would be an amazing UX.
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I think you can do this. It would be a transfer of ownership and counterfeit detection all in one!
But that if each note was tied to a specific public key, then the number of times a note could be transferred would be limited. Whenever you transfer ownership of a UTXO, Mercury Wallet creates a backup transaction in case the Mercury server is uncooperative or offline. This lets the UTXO's current owner cash out of Mercury into their own wallet.
To make sure the previous owner can't just broadcast a backup transaction after transferring their UTXO, Mercury puts a time lock on the backup transaction, preventing the transaction from being mined before a certain time. Each transfer makes a new backup transaction with a time lock that expires sooner so that the current owner can send their own backup before any other previous owner.
This means that the UTXO (and therefore the note) can be transferred until the time lock can no longer be subtracted from. The current owner then has to either cash out into their own wallet or transfer the sats into a fresh note.
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When is the backup deadline set? Upon instantiation? Or upon each transfer?
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I believe its both. When you instantiate a new UTXO with Mercury, a backup transaction is created with the time lock built in. Every time the UTXO is transferred, a new backup transaction is created for the new owner with a time lock that expires sooner than that of the previous owner.
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Definitely going to watch their explorer: https://explorer.mercurywallet.com/
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Been using this for a bit. Needs more liquidity
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Looks like mercury wallet no longer exists
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This post was featured on This Day in Stacker News.
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Is this custodial?
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No
Can the MercuryWallet.com seize my coins?
In the Mercury protocol, the Mercury server securely deletes expired private key shares (via Intel SGX based HSM) while it never has custody or control over deposits and cannot be compelled to confiscate or freeze funds. If the Mercury server disappears or is uncontactable then the owner will have to wait until the lock-time of their backup transaction to regain full control of the coin.
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What is default lock-time ?