Bitcoin contracts --- digital economy without lawyers?
Event details
| Date | 19.06.2014 |
| Hour | 14:00 |
| Speaker | Stefan DZIEMBOWSKI, University of Warsaw |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
BitCoin is a digital currency system introduced in 2008 by an anonymous developer using a pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto". Despite of its mysterious origins, Bitcoin became the first cryptographic currency that got widely adopted --- as of May 2014 the Bitcoin capitalization is over 5 bln euro. Bitcoin owes its popularity mostly to the fact that it has no central authority, the transaction fees are very low, and the amount of coins in the circulation is restricted, which in particular means that nobody can "print" money to generate inflation. The financial transactions between the participants are published on a public ledger maintained jointly by the users of the system.
One of the very interesting, but slightly less known, features of the Bitcoin is the fact that it allows for more complicated "transactions" than the simple money transfers between the participants: very informally, in Bitcoin it is possible to "deposit" some amount of money in such a way that it can be claimed only under certain conditions. These conditions are written in the form of the "Bitcoin scripts" and in particular may involve some timing constrains. This property allows to create the so-called "contracts", where a number of mutually-distrusting parties engage in a Bitcoin-based protocol to jointly perform some task. The security of the protocol is guaranteed purely by the properties of the Bitcoin, and no additional trust assumptions are needed. This Bitcoin feature can have several applications in the digital economy, like creating the assurance contracts, the escrow and dispute mediation, the rapid micropayments, the multiparty lotteries.
In this talk I will give a short introduction to this area, present some recent results, and highlight the future research directions.
One of the very interesting, but slightly less known, features of the Bitcoin is the fact that it allows for more complicated "transactions" than the simple money transfers between the participants: very informally, in Bitcoin it is possible to "deposit" some amount of money in such a way that it can be claimed only under certain conditions. These conditions are written in the form of the "Bitcoin scripts" and in particular may involve some timing constrains. This property allows to create the so-called "contracts", where a number of mutually-distrusting parties engage in a Bitcoin-based protocol to jointly perform some task. The security of the protocol is guaranteed purely by the properties of the Bitcoin, and no additional trust assumptions are needed. This Bitcoin feature can have several applications in the digital economy, like creating the assurance contracts, the escrow and dispute mediation, the rapid micropayments, the multiparty lotteries.
In this talk I will give a short introduction to this area, present some recent results, and highlight the future research directions.
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- Serge Vaudenay
Contact
- Sylvie Thomet