_{https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/update-townhall-and-witness-meeting}

The most important question in our minds going into these meetings was not whether we share the same vision for Steem, but whether these two organizations, each with their own strengths, can work together to help realize one another’s visions. We were happy and somewhat surprised, to discover that this is the case.

Both organizations are trying to onboard the masses to the blockchain through amazing applications. But while Steem is taking a more application-specific approach that enables it to provide speed, consistent user experience, and free transactions, TRON is constructing an ecosystem of interconnected databases like the TRON blockchain and BTFS each of which serves a specific purpose. They see the Steem blockchain as the perfect addition to this ecosystem.

After meeting with the team we all agreed that the best way to progress our missions and add value to one another’s stakeholders is to connect our two powerful blockchains through Cross-Chain Atomic Swaps!

Sure, sounds great!

I just can't help but feel I'm being told what I want to hear. When Steemit Inc hands the Steem witnesses a hardfork and tells us to update our blockchain, it's a completely different dynamic with the company having been essentially sold to Tron. Code review is going to be pretty important now, I hope the Steemit dev team suddenly learned to well document and organize all of their code into something that actually can be reviewed. If not, do you think the witnesses will update it? That's a pretty uncomfortable situation.

How would the atomic swap even work?

I don't know much about atomic swaps, but I do know that they are extremely complicated. Will there be some kind of arbiter that attempts to sync both blockchains for said atomic swaps? Will their be locked smart-contracts waiting for a transaction to go through on the other chain?

My vision of atomic swaps between two smart-contract platforms would be to mirror the other chain with a token. We make a Tron SMT here and a Steem TRC-10 over there. Of course the more I think about it the more it makes no sense, because this technology is complicated and security is difficult. I'm curious how they want to go about it.

There's also the prospect of calling something an atomic-swap when it is actually pretty centralized. Give the centralized agent the money and trust them to make the swap. We could then work backwards and try to automate the process and slowly get rid of the central authority (this is Binance's model). Fun to speculate but also silly to do so.

Conclusion

The potential threat of Tron being in charge of a Steem blockchain hardfork puts the witnesses in an uncomfortable position and makes code review an utmost priority. Considering the space we are in (open source development) all code should obviously be well documented and reviewed by multiple third parties.

However, the value of legitimate atomic-swap technology between the Steem and Tron ecosystems cannot be overstated. It would likely propel both chains to much higher market caps (especially Steem which is obviously much lower on the list).

I feel baited.

I accept the Trojan Horse with open arms.

One-way Atomic-Swaps

Just thought of this one. The only way you can create SteemTRC10 is to send Steem to @null with a memo of something like "SteemTRC10" and vice versa with Tron to TronSMT. Liquidity might be a little weird. Can the pegs be maintained? It's all about cross-chain consensus. Steem would have to create tokens out of thin air when SteemTRC10 got burned on Tron. Tron would have to create Tron coins out of thin air when TronSMT got burned on the Steem blockchain. Can we come to consensus? Hopefully.

Posted via Steemleo