Safety Model

Coalesce's safety rests on one explicit assumption, stated plainly rather than buried in fine print: funds are safe as long as more than two-thirds of members are honest, the standard threshold assumption for this class of system. A single honest node can always recover its own money regardless of what the rest of the group does.

What -enforce does

Running a node with -enforce (recommended for any real use) makes it defend itself automatically rather than requiring you to manually watch for and react to misbehavior.

What this does and doesn't protect against

• Protects against: a minority of dishonest members trying to move funds without the required quorum, or trying to close the cluster on terms the rest of the group didn't agree to.
• Doesn't protect against: a dishonest supermajority (more than one-third of members colluding against you, depending on cluster size and quorum). This is the same class of assumption every threshold system makes, not a Coalesce-specific weakness.
• Doesn't protect against: losing your own nodeX.key file. That file is your identity in the group, so keep it private; losing it isn't something the protocol can recover for you.

Startup self-checks

Every time a node starts, it re-checks whether the cluster is still open on-chain, even if it was offline when something happened. See Guides: Recovering After Being Offline for the two outcomes of that check.