I worked on the資料 for half the night for @BabylonLabs_io . I originally wanted to verify the permissions and boundary of the liquidators, but I got caught in a “anti-censorship” design. #baby
People think that the act of a borrower depositing BTC to create a vault is just something for that person alone—sign it and it’s done. Turns out it’s not. The TBV docs say that, to prevent newly deposited funds from being subject to review, the step of creating the vault requires a threshold of k out of n liquidators to jointly sign the transaction—not just any liquidator you can pick and ignore, and not necessarily all of them have to show up. In other words, when you deposit, your action naturally needs the “nods” of a small group of liquidators.
That’s interesting. On the surface, this looks like an anti-censorship design—if one liquidator acts maliciously and refuses to sign your request to create the vault, as long as you can gather k honest ones, you’re fine; a single bad liquidator can’t block everything.
But flip it around: who exactly are these liquidators chosen from, how is the whitelist set, and what are the specific values of k and n? Those numbers aren’t explicitly fixed in the materials. I couldn’t find any published threshold settings—this part is currently opaque. “Anti-censorship” sounds like it protects depositors, but only if the liquidator set itself is sufficiently decentralized and sufficiently distributed. Otherwise, “threshold signatures” and a “permissioned whitelist” are separated by only a hair.
This is different from the steps of withdrawal and liquidation—those docs explicitly state that they require no trust, can be executed unilaterally, and don’t depend on anyone else’s mood. But in this vault-creation step, you’re effectively placed behind a threshold mechanism. That distinction is something I hadn’t really considered before.
My current stance is to treat this as something to observe first: it doesn’t affect my small-scale tests, but I won’t immediately regard this mechanism as “fully decentralized.” Have you found out how this liquidator whitelist is specifically selected? Can you dig into it?#baby $BABY
People think that the act of a borrower depositing BTC to create a vault is just something for that person alone—sign it and it’s done. Turns out it’s not. The TBV docs say that, to prevent newly deposited funds from being subject to review, the step of creating the vault requires a threshold of k out of n liquidators to jointly sign the transaction—not just any liquidator you can pick and ignore, and not necessarily all of them have to show up. In other words, when you deposit, your action naturally needs the “nods” of a small group of liquidators.
That’s interesting. On the surface, this looks like an anti-censorship design—if one liquidator acts maliciously and refuses to sign your request to create the vault, as long as you can gather k honest ones, you’re fine; a single bad liquidator can’t block everything.
But flip it around: who exactly are these liquidators chosen from, how is the whitelist set, and what are the specific values of k and n? Those numbers aren’t explicitly fixed in the materials. I couldn’t find any published threshold settings—this part is currently opaque. “Anti-censorship” sounds like it protects depositors, but only if the liquidator set itself is sufficiently decentralized and sufficiently distributed. Otherwise, “threshold signatures” and a “permissioned whitelist” are separated by only a hair.
This is different from the steps of withdrawal and liquidation—those docs explicitly state that they require no trust, can be executed unilaterally, and don’t depend on anyone else’s mood. But in this vault-creation step, you’re effectively placed behind a threshold mechanism. That distinction is something I hadn’t really considered before.
My current stance is to treat this as something to observe first: it doesn’t affect my small-scale tests, but I won’t immediately regard this mechanism as “fully decentralized.” Have you found out how this liquidator whitelist is specifically selected? Can you dig into it?#baby $BABY