Can Criminals Take Advantage of Blockchain Smart Contracts?
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....
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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 empower criminals with sophisticated trustless collaboration means, the prestigious MIT Technology Review reports. Cornell University professors Ari Juels and Elaine Shi, with University of Maryland researcher Ahmed Kosba, present several cyber-crime scenarios enabled by smart contracts in the recently published paper "The Ring of Gyges: Using Smart Contracts for Crime." The Ring of Gyges is a mythical magical ring mentioned in Plato's Republic which grants its owner the power to become invisible at will. Of....
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....
Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, Founder and CEO of Bitnation, explains to Cointelegraph how smart contracts can lower costs of your business. Cointelegraph: What are Smart Contracts about? Susanne Tarkowski: Smart contracts are applications ‘living on’ the Blockchain, and therefore can’t be censored. Simple, immutable and autonomous applications, basically. As Primavera de Filippi eloquently phrased it during her talk at OuiShare Paris 2016 “Smart Contracts are neither smart nor contracts...”. But ironically, smart contracts are however ideally suited to be… well… contracts! In essence, your....
Smart contracts hold tremendous promise as the 'killer app' for blockchains. If you're not familiar, a smart contract is a computer program that automatically executes the terms of a contract on a blockchain. In principle, you can use smart contracts for a wide variety of purposes, such as wireless service contracts, apartment and hotel room rentals, freelance work contracts, automating payments – anyplace you'd want to cut out the middle person. With more than $17bn in assets stored in just the top 10 cryptocurrencies, there currently is a huge opportunity to give existing blockchain....