Additional information has become available about Wallet of Satoshi's new non-custodial Lightning Network service and it has sparked a discussion whether it's non-custodial at all and to what degree. WOS will use Spark as its node operator, requiring a degree of trust in the operator. Spark is a statechain and not trustless. Allegedly, the statechain could collude with certain users to steal money if there are no honest operators.
The creator of Spark, Kevin Hurley disagrees with certain accusations. He says that Spark relies on a 1-of-n operators model that requires honestly at the moment of sending BTC over Lightning. Once that happens, no further malicious attempts can affect the money you sent.
You can follow the discussion
here.
Spark, is that some sort of BTC-to-Lightning exchanger like Boltz?
In that case, I can see how it is not decentralized.
Obviously you need to have a large open channel backed with a lot of (your) other BTC in order to have the capability of being able to send sats to someone else's Lightning node.
And not only that, but regulators could also gate-keep the process at the "Received BTC; Now send sats" stage.
