Introduction

tbs - brief history of group formation and launch - audience for this report (primary: Kantara leadership; secondary: others)The Blockchain and Smart Contracts Discussion Group was launched in July 2016. This report from the group offers recommendations and observations to Kantara Initiative covering the following scope:

• Solving use cases for empowering traditionally disempowered parties (such as individuals)
• taking part in transactions (such as entering into contracts and information-sharing agreements)
• with parties that traditionally hold greater power (such as companies and large countries)
• in the context of decentralization technologies and techniques (such as blockchain and smart contracts)
• and their mixture with identity (both in the context of requiring identification for transaction purposes and to solve broader digital identity use cases).

Beyond Kantara, the group anticipates that anyone else who is interested in these topics may find this report useful.

A recurring theme in digital identity communities as well as in blockchain communities is the question of balancing the control between individuals and other entities – to enable disempowered entities to rise to the level of a "peer" in some fashion. A legal term for the way the imbalance may assert itself in a transaction is a "contract of adhesion" (a standard-form, take-it-or-leave-it contract). Two key aspects of this imbalance are:

• Granularity: The less-empowered party must accept a totality of trust and liability, rather than a smaller apportionment.
• Dynamism: The less-empowered party must accept a the contract all at once in time and can't change the parameters now or in future.

Frame the tensions as themes:

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tbs - where to identify and analyze issues uncovered through the use cases?