This is quite exciting after Mercury because it's a completely different approach.

One way or another, it looks like decentralized exchanges are about to become a reality.

A few questions:


If none of the currently most trusted signers have cheated, I think it's inevitable that they will, as incumbents, be likely to retain their positions as most trusted. So wouldn't you have the three most trusted people permanently capable of colluding and stealing all of the funds on the exchange secured by 3-of-5 multisigs?

Also, no offense intended, but wouldn't the most trusted signers be Jordan and the devs?

So aren't we, in effect, being asked to trust a few known people with our money?

Also, I would guess that the signers, being always online, could easily learn one another's ip addresses if they were so inclined. Suppose the scheme is 8-of-15 and an attacker has control of 4 pseudonymous signers. He would need to successfully ddos any 4 of the remaining 11 signers in order to block withdrawals and extort the depositors.

An attacker would try to ddos them all. Let the probability of successfully ddosing a signer be p.

Then the probability of knocking out 4 of 11 is:

Sum from i = 4 to 11:   B(11, i) * (p ** i) (1-p)**(11-i)

where B is the binomial coefficient.

With a 20% chance of a successful ddos, that's a 16% chance of successfully blocking withdrawals. At a 50% ddos success rate, the probability of crippling the exchange is 88%.

Actually, an attacker with no signers and a 50% ddos success rate has a 50% chance of succeeding at such an attack.


Yikes! If the shareholders feel so inclined, can they pass a motion requiring all the depositors' funds to be distributed among themselves?