The Future of Smart Contracts: Positive Social Innovation or Criminal Activity?

Bitcoin has typically been associated with criminal activity, as the anonymous nature of transactions allowed illegal dealings to be practically untraceable without any money trail. While the underlying blockchain technology has gained a better reputation for possibly transforming several industries, its smart contracts might be vulnerable to criminal use as well. This has been explored by an article on the MIT Technology Review website, tackling the issue of how criminals could also tap into this blockchain technology. Blockchain refers to the public ledger of bitcoin transactions, which....

Hackers are soon going to be the new lawyers as the adoption of smart contracts increase in the near future. The advent of Blockchain 2.0 and Blockchain 3.0 has given rise to new ways of automation using Bitcoin’s underlying technology. There are special cryptocurrency platforms like Ethereum, Rootstock, Counterparty, Lisk and more that allows people to create smart contracts on the blockchain. These smart contracts enable automation by allowing developers to set trigger conditions. These trigger conditions are certain prerequisites, when met, will execute the function programmed on the....

Smart contracts, a feature of "Bitcoin 2.0" technologies such as Ethereum, could soon operate on the Internet of Things (IoT), control objects in the physical world, and power a new decentralized version of the sharing economy, for example sharing services similar to Uber and Airbnb that operate in pure P2P mode without centralized management. Smart contracts represent a disruptive innovation with a huge potential. In 2001, legendary cryptographer Nick Szabo spoke of smart contracts that solved the problem of trust by being self-executing and having property embedded with information about....

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....

Solidity and EVM make smart contracts available to every developer out there, regardless of experience. This is a good way to boost innovation in the smart contract space, but may not yield the best results in the initial stages. The recent debacle surrounding The DAO has shed an interesting spotlight on smart contract technology. Since individual developers wrote the entire concept of this project, it looks like smart contracts are not completely trustless. There is still a lot of work to be done before this technology is ready for mainstream adoption. Not everyone is capable of – or....