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Smart
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Board games show how interesting patterns emerge from play within a framework of simple rules. The market economy is such a pattern, emergent from property rights and contracts as the rules of the game. Just as chess doesn't change when you switch from wooden to aluminum pieces, the virtues of market phenomena should survive when ported into a properly secured digital world. The rules of the capability game are well matched to the rules needed for market interactions. Capabilities are bearer instruments for rights, and message passing is the secure rights transfer primitive. Simple programs can then express Smart Contracts, arrangements granting derived rights to the participants, where the terms of the contract are enforced by the program's execution. |
Smart Contracts are Nick Szabo's idea
- Check out his home page
- Nick's "Contracts with Bearer" is particularly relevant
What are Smart Contracts?
Here
is a slightly idealized explanation of AMIX (The American Information
Exchange)--the first smart contracting system.
Our paper, Capability-based Financial Instruments, explains how Smart Contracts can be written in E. In contains two main examples:
- The simplest example Smart Contract: Money in E.
- A more interesting example: A Covered Call Option (as in Stock Options) in E.
Donut-Lab, a PlanetLab with no center, built from Smart Contracts
ERTP: The Electronic Rights Transfer Protocol
ERTP has been superceded by the Waterken IOU Protocol. This section remains for historical interest.
Capabilities are electronic rights of a sort, but by themselves lack 2 crucial features needed for tradable electronic rights:
- Exclusive rights transfer.
- Assayability (so a 3rd party can determine if a trade is mutually acceptable).
The next layer above distributed capabilities, ERTP, does provide these properties. The ERTP protocol accommodates fungible & non-fungible rights, exclusive & non-exclusive rights, and blinded or non-blinded transfer. Only electronic rights manipulable via ERTP are called erights.
ERTP is a simple protocol involving only 4 types and 9 methods. Money in ERTP shows money re-implemented as a proper eright. Money is exclusive, fungible, and non-exercisable. Money transfers should be blinded, but this implementation provides only non-blinded transfer.
By contrast, exclusive.updoc implements, as an exclusively transferable eright, the ability to invoke (pass messages to) particular underlying objects that an Issuer decides to make accessible in this manner. These erights are exclusive, non-fungible, and exersizable. As Nick explains in Contracts with Bearer, since these erights are non-fungible, nothing would be gained by blinding their transfer.
ERTP has been independently implemented as part of the Waterken Sea package, which also defines many particular erights. The Waterken version of ERTP seems better on many dimensions than the one explained here, and we expect to be adopting it (or a close variant of it) as our new definition of ERTP.
Presentations
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"Computer Security as the Future of Law" Presented at Extro-3
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"Contracting-out Contract Law" (Powerpoint) Presented at Lex Cybernetoria 2
Smart contracts present new hope for the third world. -
The Pencil, the Brick, and the Law, presented at Austrian perspectives on the New Economy
Much improved restatement of Contracting-out Contract Law, thanks to The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto. -
The Digital Path: Smart Contracts and the Third World. Draft of paper for the previously mentioned talk. Self contained explanation of much of the other material.
Unless stated otherwise, all text on this page which is either unattributed or by Mark S. Miller is hereby placed in the public domain.
