When dealing with online contracting, blockchain, clickwrap agreements, smart contracts, or just generally these days (and certainly in the future), you will come across the terms “hash” and “encryption.” Especially when discussing digital signatures. We’ll try to distill these a bit for you. These are all regularly used in the transmittal of electronic information and verification of the information, the sender and/or receiver. Read more
Tag: smart contract
A Look at Smart Contracts
Nick Szabo is credited as being the visionary, if not the godfather, of smart contracts. He sees smart contracts as agreements that “involve objectively verifiable performances, or performances that can be automated such as cash flows.” His blog “unenumerated” is fantastic (deep posts on a variety of topics – each one is an ocean of thought in and of itself) and his appearance on Tim Ferriss’ podcast is probably the best crash course on all things blockchain and crypto-currency related.
Nick’s proposed definition of a “smart contract” is (1) a set of promises (2) specified in digital format (3) which includes various protocols (4) within which the parties perform. Read more