Experts in law and cryptography are speaking today at a smart contracts day in Athens, organised by IOHK chief scientist Aggelos Kiayias, chair of cyber security and privacy at the University of Edinburgh as well as director of its Blockchain Technology Laboratory. Smart contracts are an emerging technology that run on the same infrastructure that supports Bitcoin: a blockchain…

In my last blog post, we looked at the very basics of proof refinement systems. I noted at the end that there was a big drawback of the systems as shown, namely that information flows only in one direction: from the root of a proof tree to the leaves. In this post, we'll see how to get information to flow in the opposite direction as well. The code for this blog post can be…

In this blog post, I'm going to discuss the overall structure of a proof refinement system. Such systems can be used for implementing automatic theorem provers, proof assistants, and type checkers for programming languages. The proof refinement literature is either old or hard to understand, so this post, and subsequent ones on the same topic, will present it in a more casual…

The concept of smart contracts has grown considerably since the birth of Ethereum. We've seen an explosion of interdisciplinary research and experimentation bundling legal, social, economic, cryptographic and even philosophical concerns into a rather strange milieu of tokenized intellect. Yet despite this digital cambrian explosion of thought, there seems to be a lack of a…

This article is inspired by my recent visit to a blockchain technology conference and my discussions with colleagues about ideas to improve blockchain. Most of the conference speakers were from big Russian banks and their talks were about blockchain use cases, mainly as databases or smart contract platforms. However, none of the speakers were able to answer the question, ‘why…