Slock.it to Introduce Smart Locks Linked to Smart Ethereum Contracts, Decentralize the Sharing Economy

Cryptography and smart contracts will give counselors and other mental health professionals freedom to choose how they conduct business, and ethical regulations will be imposed in a decentralized and peaceful fashion based on network consensus. This privatization of counseling will ensure fairness as well as punish shoddy therapists. It will also abolish....

With contributions from Zerado, FinTech Network have produced a whitepaper that looks at smart contracts and how they could improve efficiencies within the banking sector. The whitepaper highlights: How smart contracts aim to provide security that is superior to traditional contract law and ways they can reduce other transactional and administrative costs. The workings of Ethereum as one of the best examples of smart contracts in practice. Ways that smart contracts could benefit areas such as mortgages, clearing and settlement, KYC & bonds. How challenges with conceptual misalignment,....

Smart contracts are a key underpinning of blockchain technology, yet they are still misunderstood in many ways. In the fullness of their deployment, they will be no less revolutionary than the invention of the HTML markup language that allowed information to be openly published and linked on the Web. Smart contracts promise to program our world on the head of blockchains, and potentially replace many functions currently executed by expensive or slow intermediaries. Historically, the concept was first introduced by Nick Szabo in 1994. Smart contracts then had a long gestation period of....

"The two things to know about smart contracts is that they’re dumb, and they’re not contracts." This statement from Harvard Berkman Center's Patrick Murck seems increasingly relevant in the wake of the collapse of The DAO. The ethereum-based fund was the largest smart contract issued to date, and its failure has led many to reconsider how ready the technology is for primetime. At their core, smart contracts facilitate decentralized applications by eliminating trust points. Because they automate existing processes, many believe smart contracts could someday lower costs across....

As the developer of a popular blockchain platform, I sometimes gets asked whether Ethereum-like smart contracts are on the MultiChain roadmap. The answer I always give is always: 'No, or at least not yet'. But in the hype-filled world of blockchains, smart contracts are all the rage, so why ever not? Well, the problem is, while we now know of three strong use cases for permissioned bitcoin-style blockchains (provenance, company recordkeeping and lightweight finance), we've yet to find the equivalent for Ethereum smart contracts. It's not that people don't understand what they want smart....