Distributed Electronic Rights in JavaScript
Venue
ESOP'13 22nd European Symposium on Programming, Springer (2013)
Publication Year
2013
Authors
Mark S. Miller, Tom Van Cutsem, Bill Tulloh
BibTeX
Abstract
Contracts enable mutually suspicious parties to cooperate safely through the
exchange of rights. Smart contracts are programs whose behavior enforces the terms
of the contract. This paper shows how such contracts can be specified elegantly and
executed safely, given an appropriate distributed, secure, persistent, and
ubiquitous computational fabric. JavaScript provides the ubiquity but must be
significantly extended to deal with the other aspects. The first part of this paper
is a progress report on our efforts to turn JavaScript into this fabric. To
demonstrate the suitability of this design, we describe an escrow exchange contract
implemented in 42 lines of JavaScript code.
