[brugeman]

Great point. Not sure about state channels, but there are proposals for the Lightning Network. You could reveal a packet of data inside the payment confirmation itself, so it becomes atomic [1]. However, there are still issues: throughput, obviously, but then there needs to be a way to check the packet of data for correctness.

[1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...

[rixtox]

Yes, it's the basic idea of all the blockchain based implementations. The challenge here is you have to seal the data packet first, make a layer 2 commitment that has some kind of cryptographic binding to the data. Then you have to have a mechanism to atomically open the data while paying the contract. This can be done with some homomorphic properties of some cryptographic primitives but the computational cost is currently very high.