Mercury Wallet is the answer to BTC scalability & privacy according to a software engineer and privacy advocate, Nicholas Gregory, who spoke on Bitcoin privacy and advancements at the privacy-focused company (Mercury Wallet).
The discussion was especially timely in light of recent developments at Tornado Cash, which have stoked debate over Bitcoin’s supremacy, at least in terms of censorship resistance.
Censorship risk remains an unanswered problem for Ethereum investors as the Merge approaches. Especially because the migration to Proof-of-Stake may subject the protocol to punish compliance once again, but this time through staking validators.
While Bitcoin is not completely immune to censorship risk, for example, through CoinJoin or the Lightning Network, the prevailing consensus is that Proof-of-Work technologies remain more resilient when it comes to functioning trustlessly.
Tornado Cash Scandal Stresses Privacy Importance
On August 8, the US Treasury put Tornado Cash on its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) list. Since 2019, officials have accused the crypto mixer of laundering nearly $7 billion in illegal cryptocurrency.
Tornado Cash’s USDC wallets were blacklisted, the developers were kicked off Github, and the website was shut down as a result of the consequences. To make matters worse, addresses dealing with the banned wallets were also notified. Aave suspended Tron creator Justin Sun’s account after a malicious prankster gave him 0.1 ETH from a Tornado Cash address, according to Sun’s tweet.
Some stated that the sanctions against the crypto mixer were a big overreach of legal authority and may have potentially infringed on human rights and free speech.
Statechain Technology For Privacy
As a result, defending personal privacy in the face of state overreach becomes even more crucial, and Gregory believes he has found a solution in the Bitcoin Statechain technology on which Mercury Wallet is built. Mercury Wallet is the answer to BTC scalability & privacy, Gregory thinks.
Statechain is a Bitcoin layer 2 solution that prioritizes transaction secrecy. It functions similarly to the Lightning Network in that transactions are moved off the main chain and onto its own chain to enable quick and low-fee private transactions.
Mercury Wallet, in essence, never holds or controls funds. Instead, value is transmitted by handing over the private key of the sender’s wallet to the receiver. The amount of Bitcoin delivered in a transaction under this approach is set once a user generates the Statechain (the UTXO), which means it cannot be divided into numerous separate amounts.
Users must, however, believe that the Statechain supplier is not in collusion with the prior private key holder. The foregoing situation is regarded implausible based on Statechains’ reputation. Especially since each transaction has a unique private key and the bad actor would need the consent of all previous users to scam the system.
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