

The Idea of Smart Contracts (1997) - MichaelAO
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/idea.html

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danray
Interesting way to look at it.

Another example, of course, would be digital rights management. Interestingly,
DRM's high-water mark (from the perspective of those who insisted on it) began
shortly after this article was written, when it was formalized by the DMCA’s
anti-circumvention provisions. As the author would say, this helped to enhance
the costs of “breaching” the DRM’s contract. (In the same way, laws against
vandalism and petty theft enhance the costs of “breaching” the vending
machine’s contract.)

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miguelrochefort
[https://www.ethereum.org/](https://www.ethereum.org/)

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MichaelAO
After a few months of diving into the technical details, I'm bullish on
ethereum (or maybe I should say bullish on block chain technology). Any
thoughts on it?

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miguelrochefort
I believe that blockchains are a very naïve and expensive solution to a non-
problem.

Consensus is simply not needed.

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kolinko
Relevant? Bitcoin itself has very limited functionality for smart contracts,
but a set of distributed oracles could change that.

We're building such a system here: [http://orisi.org/](http://orisi.org/) and
there's a whitepaper available here -
[https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-
Paper](https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper)

A similar system could be used for Ethereum as well, to bring external inputs
into the mix.

