I call bullshit. This relies on special access to SGX which Intel controls. This means you must trust Intel and anyone who may hack Intel and therefore it is not a secure decentralized solution.
SGX requires contacting Intel's servers to get an attestation key. There is a good reason Intel requires this. That reason is that SGX doesn't otherwise provide the DRM it was designed to for. With out Intel's attestation keys anyone could emulate SGX in software thus exposing the code and data in the SGX enclave.
If I'm not mistaken:
1) SGX is already shipped in Intel skylake CPU's (i5's and i7's).
2) Development access is publicly also available for anyone who wants to use SGX. Sure, to run an enclave in production mode and to perform remote attestation you need a license with Intel, however this is attainable..
3) If you don't trust Intel: (i) don't use teechan? It doesn't affect the decentralization of Bitcoin. Bitcoin still has the same trust model, except now, anyone people who DO TRUST Intel can send bitcoins to each other through SGX as well. The rest of the network doesn't need to care; (ii) I guess you trust AMD - unless you've built your own processor from scratch? It seems odd to have a problem with trusting Intel. If you use Bitcoin at all you've probably already trusted Intel (e.g. their RNG to generate your private keys, their instructions to verify and sign you transactions etc.)
Overall, "I call bullshit" sounds like teechan isn't possible. It is.
What do you mean? How do you know if your peers are cheating in the Bitcoin network? When they've broadcast a transaction that spends your money? At this point it's already too late.
In teechan the processor is responsible for holding your funds until you take them out of the channel. If somehow an attacker could steal them (which is very difficult to do considering the security model!), you would know that they cheated when they spent your funds on the network. I don't see the difference?
I think you're wrong: SGX access is available through a license agreement. But more importantly, the contributions here aren't about using Intel SGX. Teechan is agnostic to the secure harware you want to use, as long as it provides the primitives required (e.g. attestation, integrity and coinfidentiality).
SGX requires contacting Intel's servers to get an attestation key. There is a good reason Intel requires this. That reason is that SGX doesn't otherwise provide the DRM it was designed to for. With out Intel's attestation keys anyone could emulate SGX in software thus exposing the code and data in the SGX enclave.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/01/sgx_secure_until_you...