I was listening to @Manu 's explanation on the podcast this morning and a question occurred to me.
The IC is secure because the subnets can refresh the public key and switch it out for a new key via a zk generation of a key portion. They can do this a bunch so bad actors have limited time to coordinate(I don’t know how often this actually happens…would be great to know).
With BTC and ETH integrating, we need to control addresses and contracts from a specific identity. Once these are generated and on chain, you can’t really swap them out(unless the contract you are interacting with supports it). So will these keys be inherently less secure? If I ask the subnet to generate an address for me, I’m guessing all nodes have a bit of the key. If >2/3 decide I have too much at my address they could collude to take it? And they have infinity amount of time to do this because I can’t change the key on the remote chains?
What if more than 1/3 of the original nodes that generated your key portions go offline permanently? The IC can just add new nodes and generate a new public key…ETH and BTC won’t be able to do this.
I’m probably missing something here, but I think it is worth understanding.
Edit: I’m sure on ETH you could overcome this by always sending requests through a wallet-like contract that has the functionality for swapping out keys…not sure about BTC.