Tag Archives: smart oracles

holytx welcome new coins

HolyTransaction supports five new crypto assets

HolyTransaction Five Crypto Assets

HolyTransaction has added five new crypto assets to the platform: USDC, MANA, ENG, ANT, and LINK.

USD Coin (USDC) is a fully collateralized US dollar stablecoin. It is an Ethereum powered coin and is the brainchild of CENTRE,

Decentraland (MANA) defines itself as a virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. In this virtual world, users purchase plots of land that they can later navigate, build upon, and monetize. Decentraland uses two tokens: MANA and LAND.

Enigma (ENG) is a crypto platform that’s trying to solve the problem of privacy on the blockchain by giving access to data storage and privacy while remaining scalable. Enigma aims to extend Ethereum Smart Contracts by introducing secret contracts.

Aragon (ANT) is a decentralized platform built on the Ethereum network that offers a modularized way to create and manage dApps, cryptoprotocols, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO). The ANT ERC-20 token will enable its holders to govern the Aragon Network.

Chainlink (LINK) connects decentralized peer-to-peer networks and smart contracts to real-world data, events, and payments. Since blockchains cannot access data outside their network, oracles (a defi instrument) are needed to function as data feeds in smart contracts.

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Satoshi

Smart Contracts as new laws? Better handle with care

(Sole24Ore) “A contract is an agreement”, this was the mandatory phrase for starting a private law exam test after which we would discuss the conditions for its validity. Today, university memories are coming back as contracts are revised in technological form; indeed they’re called Smart Contracts. This brilliant intuition came from Nick Szabo who proposed them in 1994, even before Bitcoin and the diffusion of the Internet.
Let’s start with the definition:
“Smart Contracts are computer protocols that facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract, or that obviate the need for a contractual clause. Smart contracts aim to provide security superior to traditional contract law and to reduce other transaction costs associated with contracting.”
The words in bold about automatic performance of the clauses is a source of opportunities and risks, questions and doubts. One thing is certain: A Smart Contract isn’t a contract, but only the part related to agreements performance.
Until now, when one of the contracting parties feels the other party didn’t respect a clause of the contract then a third party need to be called in order to settle the conflict. This neutral authority has always been a human one. Now, we rely increasingly on technology to facilitate relationships between humans, even if this could seem an oxymoron. Maths (or should we say cryptography) intends regulating any operation between each one of us, close or far, a known or unknown stakeholder.
How do technology and economy meet at this point?
If a contract represents the formalization of an agreement, how can we make it secure between parties that remotely agree and maybe don’t even know each other? The answer is
Smart Contracts based on Blockchain technology.
The contract then becomes an instructions set. If it can be codified, it can also be “computed”, i.e. if the conditions are satisfied, it ensures that performance is automatic.
It sounds like a futuristic scenario, but in reality the Internet of Things (IoT) includes this form of contracts for new services. All is fine, in the end “equal justice for all”, not only for those who possess the power. Eliminating all excess of human discretion which leads to long and inconclusive civil lawsuits is actually one step forward.
But in which direction?
If we choose the one that leads to no human discretion at all, the risk may be even greater. These systems are fascinating, they open up incredible scenarios, but they also are autonomous and immutable. This isn’t good, machines must remain instruments. They mustn’t have the last word. Otherwise this will be the first step on a slope in which decision power is given to machines. Instead, we would like machines that assist us in the decision-making process. We must leverage them but not be ruled by them. The variability of emotions remains a human factor that we shouldn’t give up.
The third party, not human, to which we entrust the performance of contract can’t always be mathematics. We hope for a coexistence with the practitioners: the new generation lawyer will have to know how to write a Smart Contract, for example translating the clauses into computer code as shown in the figure.
All this to emphasize the fact that Smart Contracts should be used to control the performance, and never to judge. New technologies require for behavioral models to adapt. . We must use them according to their usefulness, without extremisms. We will use these instruments but wisely, because we don’t live in a deterministic world. Not yet.
Author: Massimo Chiriatti, technologist and member of Assob.it

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Satoshi
Alex Grey Cosmic Christ CROP1 1000x288

Smart contracts may depend on Smart Oracles, said CTO of Ripple Labs

Smart contracts may depend on Smart Oracles to inform contracts about the state of the outside world, said CTO of Ripple Labs
(BitcoinMagazine) Stefan Thomas is one of the more talented and respected developers in
the space. An old hat at this young technology, he has been making
waves as the CTO of Ripple labs. In a recent effort he has set his
sights on smart contracts technology. The designs and implementation he
and his team have come up with are interesting, to say the least.
In a white paper entitled Smart Oracles, we see described a novel, simple, and flexible approach to smart contracts.
In such a system, rules can be written in any programming language,
and contracts can interact with any service that accepts
cryptographically signed commands. The paper also includes an
implementation of smart oracles, called Codius (based on the Latin “ius” meaning “law”).
Smart contracts are an exciting new frontier for technology,
business, and law that have the potential to usher in a wave of
innovation and serve as a building block for a next chapter of the
internet.
The concept of a smart contract is to formally encode the conditions
and outcomes of a legal agreement into a computer program. Rather than
rely on another party to enforce the terms of the arrangement, the
obligations of a smart contract are settled automatically and
autonomously through the execution of its code.
As such, math-based currency networks like Bitcoin and Ripple
provide an important building block for smart contracts by allowing the
transfer of digital assets with a cryptographic signature. The benefits
of using smart contracts instead of traditional contracts are increased
speed, efficiency, and trust that the contract will be executed exactly
as agreed.
Uatu, The Watcher
Most proposals for smart contracts depend on independent entities to
inform contracts about the state of the outside world. Bitcoin contracts
rely on “oracles
to attest to facts from the outside world by introducing signatures
into the network if and only if specific conditions are met.
For instance, the smart contract for a will would need to know
whether or not someone had died. Such a system typically requires the
smart contract code to be executed on the consensus network itself. But
encoding advanced logic and executing untrusted code is complicated to
integrate. Until now, this has been one of the primary obstacles for
creating a viable smart contract system.
Smart oracles take the concept of oracles a step further by placing
the untrusted code execution in the oracles’ hands. Smart oracles, then,
are trusted or semi-trusted entities that can both provide information
about the outside world and execute the code to which the contracting
parties agreed.
By decoupling the execution of untrusted code from the consensus
databases and other services that track and transfer asset ownership,
smart contracts can be achieved without increasing the complexity of
existing consensus networks like Bitcoin and Ripple.
Algolon, The Observer
Without being tied to any single consensus network, contracts created
using smart oracles can interact with multiple networks at once as well
as virtually any type of online service. This means that a single smart
contract could interact with Bitcoin and Ripple, web-based services
like PayPal, Google, Ebay, etc. or even other Internet protocols, such
as SSH, LDAP, SMTP and XMPP.
The Codius implementation of smart oracles is designed to provide
developers with a robust and familiar platform to build smart contracts
and hit the ground running. Because Codius uses Google’s Native Client to sandbox untrusted code, developers can write contracts in any programming language.
Codius and smart oracles in general open up new possibilities for
developers, entrepreneurs, and enterprising legal and financial
professionals. Agreements that previously required lengthy legal
contracts can be translated into code and run automatically by smart
oracles.
Smart contracts hold the potential to empower people to build a
fairer, more affordable and more efficient legal system and smart
oracles are one of the simplest ways to realize that dream. Potential
use cases include bridges between value networks, escrow, cryptocurrency
wallet controls, auctions for digital assets, derivatives, debt and
equity, smart property and voting.
Since the system is extensible, the functionality will continue to expand as the ecosystem develops.

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Satoshi