Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Advancing the security of Neutrino using minimally trusted oracles

From: enclade <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2022 02:39:15 +0000

That sounds completely reasonable.

Originally I had discussed privately making the protocol design completely interactive (client sends a nonce over DNS, oracle responds signing the nonce), but it was pointed out that making them use quantized timestamps mitigated a lot of the issues regarding denial of service, and allows for fault proofs to be significantly stronger.

Delivering the oracle messages over a write only channel like Kryptoradio or Blockstream Satellite would scale extremely well too. When the oracles produce agreeing messages (hopefully, the majority of the time except on block boundaries) the additional data is only 64 bytes per additional signer, so it makes sense to broadcast any a client may want to trust.

------- Original Message -------

On Thursday, February 10th, 2022 at 4:07 PM, Devrandom <[email-masked]> wrote:

> This would be very useful for the Validating Lightning Signer project, since we need to prove to a non-network connected signer that a UTXO has not been spent. It allows the signer to make sure the channel is still active.
>
> ( the related design doc is at https://gitlab.com/lightning-signer/docs/-/blob/master/oracle.md )
>
> I think it would be useful if the oracles were non-interactive, so that they can communicate with the world over a one-way connection. This would reduce their attack surface. Instead of signing over a client-provided timestamp, we could pre-quantize the timestamp and emit attestations for each quantum time step.