Smart contracts are way more ingenious than bitcoin

Do you think today’s internet looks like the way you expected it? If you go back in times in its founding days, it was brought as a cyberlibertarian paradise for people to express themselves freely without anyone controlling the network. But then gradually web grew in a centralized manner.

In case, you want to be in touch with a distant friend, buy something online, or send an email then you just don’t have to deal with your counterpart, but also trust third party or middlemen. This all comes at some price, what we get in effectiveness, we lose in privacy, security, and accountability.

But it’s how the internet works or it’s not?

Multi-signature and oracles

A wave of organizations are creating smart contract applications and platforms. Some features have arrived to represent smart contracts. The first one is the use of multi-sig to enhance and satisfy performance. With the help of a multi-sig feature, 2 or more parties are needed to authorize a transaction before funds are released. The second is the use of oracle to observe performance, prices, or other aspects of the real world.

For instance, a smart loan agreement may deposit funds automatically in the bank account of a borrower once an oracle gets information that the loan application of the borrower has been approved. The biggest hurdle to the development of smart oracles is inserting complicated decision making into a digital currency platform, that is something Ripple’s Codius software tries to overcome.

Smart contracts with codius

The Codius execution of smart oracles is made to provide robust and familiar platform to developers to create smart contracts. For the very reason Codius uses Google’s Native Client to sandbox distrustful code, developers can create contracts in any programming language. Smart oracles and Codius offer new possibilities for developers, financial professionals, and entrepreneurs. Agreements that required lengthy legal contracts before can be now translated into code and run by smart oracles automatically.

Smart contracts have the ability to empower people to create a fairer, efficient and inexpensive legal system and smart contracts are the easiest ways to achieve that.

Potential use cases

• Escrow. Smart contracts are easy to set up as escrow accounts that keep a track of exchange between two people.  

• Cryptocurrency wallet controls. At this time, Bitcoin and Ripple don’t have a good mechanism to enable pull payments, where the seller can introduce a payment on behalf of the buyer the same way debit and credit cards too. Wallets managed by contracts can engage different types of complicated controls such as withdrawal limits and canceling access to particular entities etc. This will enable conditional payments and subscription, and powered controls over wallet access without revealing the private key.

• Derivatives. Contracts that keep a track of the performance of non-digital or digital assets can also be used as swaps, futures, options.

• Smart property. The best example of smart property can be a car which knows who its owner is based on a movable but unforgettable digital token. Contracts can be established to control the transfer of ownership rules.

Smart contracts can be improved

Smart contracts can revolutionize the world of contracts using cryptocurrency protocols. Smart contracts executed over a digital currency blockchain have significant benefits over the existing services. First, they perform on a decentralized, open network where trust isn’t based on law or reputation rather its established on deterministic software.  And because a blockchain records transactions publicly on a single ledger, it let the economic activity to become harmonized with more ease. This can boost how well markets work internationally by, for example, allowing companies that are part of the very same supply to chain to harmonize production in response to market conditions.

If smart contract technologies become popular, they will provide a strong means of establishing trust factor and bringing together markets without joining or trusting an organization or any other intermediary that is just concentrated on selling its own  services and that could prove to be a single point of failure.