Topic: Mercury Wallet -> Mercury Layer - Privacy for Bitcoin - page 4. (Read 1453 times)

As I understand Mercury wallet is something between centralized mixer service and coinjoins, you can always restore your coins from seed words even if Mercury server is down, and nobody can seize them if something goes wrong.
Private key is split shared so nobody knows full private key including Mercury server, but I would still be careful with Mercury while it is in beta phase.
One issue I noticed is that sometimes wallet does not sync or connects to server and i watched a longer video from last month that showed some other issues are possible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL3gQ3C-qPg

So now we are measuring and judging people by number of posts in this forum and trash talking the newbie are we?  
Yeah one post from that account, and who knows if he has other accounts like many of people have in this forum.
I think he first heard about Bitcoin on 4chan forum and you would see him in most Bitcoin conferences and meetings, he is not hiding his face anymore behind computer like most people.
Not defending him at all, but guy is obviously interested in privacy, and that is not meh subject for me Dave, maybe it is for you idk.
Anyway if you guys want to continue talking about Alex aka raw_avocado you can open new topic about him and go full force.

If they fix the lack of security measures then possibly, it might be good. But as of now this really looks like an answer in search of a question.
Or an answer to a question that has already been answered.
The coding I saw on gitgub, was not great. But, I really can't say I am any better since a lot of times when I do stuff the first few dozen commits are so bad when I go back and look later I wonder if I was slipped some LSD in my morning coffee when I started the project.

I use a services like Whirlpool / Wasabi / JoinMarket. But, that's just me since I run my own nodes / servers for them.



Some of the things he said in the video were not 100% accurate. I had it on late last night while doing some other things, will watch it again, before commenting more.
As for OG? Only 1 post here, the youtube channel that the video he posted here is only 10 months old mostly filled with meh videos IMO and his twitter account although 5 years old is filled with a lot of crap, yet again  IMO

At 1st glance looks like someone who wants to be an 'influencer' will go dig deeper later.

-Dave

That seems to be the case. The fraud can be trivially proven, which would obviously result in the wallet being labelled a scam and the developers being investigated, but there is no on-chain punishment (at least, not at the moment). So from that point of view it works the same as any centralized exchange or service, any mixer, or any non-open source wallet or piece of software - reputation. Not ideal, but I'd still be willing to trust them with small amounts of coins at a time to use their service in due course, once they've proven themselves.

I am not fucking representative for Mercury so I don't have to answer anything to you, and those imaginary ''attacks'' against you are just facts that nobody in this forum trusts you anymore.
Deal with it defi boy.

That newbie raw_avocado is a real person, bitcoin og and you can easily find him on youtube and other social media.
He obviously cares about privacy for Bitcoin, not about some shitcoins or scamming people.

These kinds of attacks against someone asking basic questions should set off red flags to anyone considering to use this wallet.

I also think it is strange that you are promoting something originally posted by a one-post newbie
DeFi obviously has risks, and these risks are very well known. I don't think anyone is trying to hide these risks, or lying about these risks not actually existing.

I never asked anyone to send bitcoin to any service, there was testnet and you could test how it works, not just speak in theory after few minutes of reading docs.
You can do as you like, but I also don't trust anything you say and I have your reputation to back me up on that  

I also think that Catena XXX and other defi stuff that you are advertising is also centralized junk that only have decentralized label.
Hope you also checked their ''documentation'' as well... sounds almost like a very visionary scam thing to me.

Lightning Network protocol has measures in place that specifically prevent the theft of bitcoin by your channel partners. As far as I can tell, there are no similar measures in place with Mercury protocol.

I don't think it is accurate to say that you have full custody of your coins at all times, or at least this would not be true if you were to say "sole custody". This is according to my understanding of how Mercury works.

Every centralized service that holds custody of your bitcoin says that you can withdraw at any time. So did most ponzis before they imploded.

I don't think it is safe to entrust your money with Mercury until the issue of an malicious SE stealing your money is addressed.

No I am not associated with them in away way, but I am following the project for a while, I was testing to see how it works in testnet, and I did notice some bugs in previous releases.
I didn't see many crypto projects that always have updated documentation, and Mercury was still in testing phase until recently so you can't expect miracles from them.
You could always ask them for feedback or write an issue on their github.

I don't have to trust them, but they are just one of the layer two solutions for Bitcoin, and I could also say that I don't fully trust Lightning Network or Liquid.
Idea in Mercury is that you have full custody of your coins at all times, and you could always withdraw coins to regular Bitcoin wallet.

Interesting article about Mercury statechains in Bitcoin Magazine:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/a-new-privacy-tool-for-bitcoin

Thanks. The documentation at https://docs.mercurywallet.com/docs/ should be updated with their clarification.

I think the other issues are probably more important to be addressed before anyone should consider trusting their money with this type of service.

https://mercurywallet.com/#faq

I read the documentation, and it appears there might be some missing information.

The second paragraph in the "overview" section starts talking about the "SE" but this term is never defined. It is unclear what this is.

At the end of the first paragraph of the "statechains" section, it says that any collusion between the "SE" and an old owner of a UTXO that results in theft of a UTXO can be trivially proven. This does not explain any consequences of this collusion. If someone were to buy up all the 0.0001 BTC UTXOs one at a time, and sell each UTXO before buying the next one, if they are colluding with the "SE" what would prevent them from being able to have a tx confirmed to an arbitrary address? I don't see anything in the documentation that would.

The "fraud proof" paragraph again says that it can be trivially proven if the "SE" is corrupt, and alludes that the ability to prove a "SE" is corrupt is an incentive to be "honest". Again, the documentation does not explain the actual consequences for the "SE" for being corrupt. The LN protocol for example, has concrete consequences for publishing an old channel state to close the channel -- the other party is able to recover the entire channel balance of both parties. There does not appear to be any financial consequences for a corrupt "SE" that I can see.

I am curious if you are in any way associated with this project.

Mercury Wallet moved from testnet phase and it's now officially in Beta mode working with mainnet Bitcoin.
Latest released version is 0.4.39, they made a lot of improvements, added dark theme, and I think this will soon be very good alternative for CoinJoin and Wasabi wallet, and one more tool for making private Bitcoin transactions.
Most liquidity now is for 0.001 BTC but I expect it to grow for other values in future.

If you didn't test it yet, give it a try, and before that watch video instruction to see how Mercury Wallet works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DSvNzTBePY

Few days ago member raw_avocado made a post and youtube video with various solutions we can use for improving Bitcoin privacy and one of them was new wallet called Mercury.

I got interested about it and I started reading Mercury documentation to better understand how exactly it works, and I tested it for the first time with testnet Bitcoin that is only available option now.

It is using something called CoinSwaps on layer-2 statechain that enables safe transfers of private keys without any on-chain transactions or paying miner fees, but I think there is 0.4% fee for deposits and withdrawals.

Wallet is first asking you to create 12 mnemonic words, name your wallet and add passphrase with minimum 8 characters, then you can select Statecoin value and deposit coins to generated address.



There is currently eight State coin values but liquidity is high for 0.0001 BTC so I choose that option for my testing and everything went just fine.

I am currently Awaiting Swap and Privacy Score to increase for my Statecoin, so I am calling other experienced members to join testing and report any bugs on their github page.



Website:
https://mercurywallet.com/

Github page:
https://github.com/layer2tech/mercury-wallet

Documentation:
https://docs.mercurywallet.com/docs/

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*This is unofficial thread, and I am not associated with Mercury wallet team in any way.