DG NAME

The DG name, acronym and abbreviation must not include trademarks not owned by the Organization, or content that is infringing, harmful, or inappropriate.

Blockchain and Smart Contracts (BSC) DG

DISCUSSION TOPIC/PURPOSE/MOTIVATION

Please provide a clear statement of the topic, purpose and/or motivation for the formation of this DG.

The purpose of the Kantara DG is to initiate a broad discussion on various aspects of smart-contracts and blockchain systems.

The advent of the Bitcoin currency system has generated interest in permissioned blockchain systems not only for the purposes of achieving an immutable “trustless” distributed ledger, but also for the execution of smart-contracts (code) on the blockchain P2P nodes that conforms to a given consensus algorithm.

Among other things smart contracts offers something previously attainable in paper contracts, namely the programmability of parts of the contracts whose execution is based on real-time input from external sources of data (e.g. stock ticker feed; weather reports; IoT sensor feeds, etc). When multiple nodes on the P2P execute the same smart-contract or execute parts of an interconnected contract, a certain degree of immutability of the outcome can be achieves based on the choice of the P2P consensus algorithm. This in turn provides a corresponding degree of assurance among transacting parties that the execution of the smart-contract has reached completion.

There are, however, a number of challenges in both the technical and legal spheres before smart contracts can be adopted, deployed and obtain legal standing.

Among others, the topics to be covered are as follows:

Smart contracts specification language (e.g. CommonAccord)
Legal aspects of Smart contracts specification language
Digital identities of entities specified in smart contracts
Distributed access control to private and shared repositories of smart contracts.
Legal status of consensus algorithms
Authenticated data sources/feeds
Agreements for data collection, use and disclosure (AKA Consent Receipts)

LEADERSHIP

Proposed DG Chair subject to confirmation by a vote of the DG Participants.

Thomas Hardjono (co-chair) – technical
Jim Hazard (co-chair) – legal

AUDIENCE

Anticipated audience or users of the work.

COPYRIGHT POLICY

Creative Commons Attribution-‐ShareAlike 3.0 Unported or another Organization approved Intellectual Property Rights Policy Option to cover any copyright material that may be produced as a result of DG Participants’ posts to the wiki or email archives.

PROPOSERS

Names, email addresses, and any constituent affiliations of at least the minimum set of proposers required to support forming the WG. At least 3 proposers must be listed. At least 2 of the proposers must be Kantara Initiative Members - current members list

Thomas Hardjono
Eve Maler
Jim Hazard

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