text stringlengths 159 3.23k | uuid stringlengths 36 36 |
|---|---|
Currently, contracts are drafted by lawyers, judged by courts, and enforced by the police. Smart contract cryptographic systems such as Ethereum encode contracts into a blockchain to make them self-executing, with no possibility for appeal or reversal and beyond the reach of courts and police. “Code is law” is a motto ... | 4b48cf84-0c19-4090-9349-05205956122a |
This all became apparent with the first implementation of smart contracts on the Ethereum network, the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). After more than $150 million was invested in this smart contract, an attacker was able to execute the code in a way that diverted around a third of all the DAO's assets to ... | 475cf6af-b68d-4539-9825-60282f63ab4e |
Ethereum is the second largest blockchain after Bitcoin in terms of its processing power, and while the Bitcoin blockchain cannot effectively be rolled back, that Ethereum can be rolled back means that all blockchains smaller than Bitcoin's are effectively centralized databases under the control of their operators. It ... | 7244f7b4-a9ae-445e-9b58-13f9ebebb28b |
The DAO was the first and so far only sophisticated application of a smart contract on a blockchain, and the experience suggests wider implementation is still a long way off, if it ever were to occur. All other applications currently only exist in prototype. Perhaps in a hypothetical future where code literacy is far m... | 67d2bc26-b2dc-4411-829d-021cd6b7d2f3 |
For actual operational blockchains, demand will likely only be found for simple contracts whose code can be easily verified and understood. The only rationale for employing such contracts on a blockchain rather than a centralized computer system would be for the contracts to utilize the blockchain's native currency in ... | fb201d6a-81c1-47a1-b9e3-37bd3de79203 |
Blockchain is a reliable and tamper-proof database and asset register, but only for the blockchain's native currency and only if the currency is valuable enough for the network to have strong enough processing power to resist attack. For any other asset, physical or digital, the blockchain is only as reliable as those ... | 4a90f521-78dd-44cb-b59a-1b21603d6548 |
Having every transaction recorded with every member of the network is a very costly redundancy whose only purpose is to remove intermediation. For any intermediary, whether financial or legal, there is no sense in adding this redundancy while remaining an intermediary. There is no good reason for a bank to want to shar... | 5b7dc672-0a8d-4c1a-a8c5-4df019d9d045 |
A distributed network where all nodes record all transactions will have its common transaction ledger grow exponentially faster than the number of network members. The storage and computational burden on members of a distributed network will be far larger than a centralized network of the same size. Blockchains will al... | 9f66a60b-4ab6-464c-b6ea-1d8ab268b20c |
Blockchains with their own currency, such as Bitcoin, exist orthogonally to the law; there is virtually nothing that any government authority can do to affect or alter their operation. The Federal Reserve chair has even said as much: it has no authority to regulate Bitcoin at all. Roughly every ten minutes on the Bitco... | 8138a5dd-da51-414a-bb6e-6e82e779d1d9 |
With payments, contracts, or databases operated by intermediaries, human or software errors can be easily reversed by appealing to the intermediary. In a blockchain, things are infinitely more complicated. Once a block has been confirmed and new blocks are being attached to it, it is only possible to reverse any of its... | ffaee6f1-85f4-413e-a4db-091742a7c225 |
If the second largest network in terms of processing power can have its blockchain record altered when the transactions do not go in a way that suits the interests of the development team, then the notion that any other blockchain is truly regulated by processing power is not tenable. The concentration of currency hold... | e65def0f-f987-4876-8add-1f820a7901e6 |
Such a reversal is extremely impractical and unlikely in Bitcoin, for the reasons discussed in Chapter 9 , mainly that every party in the Bitcoin network is only capable of joining the network by agreeing to existing consensus rules. The adversarial interests of different members of the ecosystem have always meant that... | 45266514-1cb7-443f-9a00-f31d7c2e861d |
A blockchain that is alterable is a functionally pointless exercise in engineering sophistry: it uses a complex and expensive method for clearance to remove intermediaries and establish immutability, but then grants an intermediary the ability to overturn that immutability. Current best practice in these fields contain... | 7c1277b6-b680-41a7-b7f4-c9028af06070 |
The security of a blockchain database is entirely reliant on the expenditure of processing power on verification of transactions and proof-of‐work. Blockchain technology can best be understood as the conversion of electric power to verifiable undisputed records of ownership and transactions. For this system to be secur... | 00319258-aad2-4af5-9f45-40cdca1b7378 |
The only commercially successful application of blockchain technology so far is electronic cash, and in particular, Bitcoin. The most common potential applications touted for blockchain technology—payments, contracts, and asset registry—are only workable to the extent that they run using the decentralized currency of t... | 0baebcc9-6966-4de8-9e64-fe0a32e4c49f |
The market test shows that the redundancies of transaction recording and proof of‐work can only be justified for the purpose of producing electronic cash and a payment network without third-party intermediation. Electronic cash ownership and transactions can be communicated in very small quantities of data. Other econo... | 7a86698a-05a7-48f5-8a8e-5dd632cc3c52 |
Good engineering begins with a clear problem and attempts to find the optimal solution for it. An optimal solution not only solves the problem, but by definition does not contain within it any irrelevant or superfluous excess. Bitcoin's creator was motivated by creating a “peer-to‐peer electronic cash”, and he built a ... | c2da45df-4332-48b8-8193-5fa5cb7a333a |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.